Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 13 July 2021

Public Accounts Committee

National Paediatric Hospital Development Board: 2019 Financial Statement (Resumed)

9:30 am

Mr. Phelim Devine:

Our medical director, Dr. Emma Curtis, who is on this call, has been heavily involved in the clinical side, in terms of benchmarking other large international pediatric hospitals. This is to ensure that our hospital is best designed for the future, that it takes care of future expansion, and that it looks to where contemporary clinical services are evolving. On the technical side, in terms of the mechanical, electrical, and technical commissioning, there have been lessons learned from recent projects in the UK and Australia, where things have gone wrong. We worked hard to ensure that we understand those downsides. They have delayed the opening of these large hospitals for a number of months or years. Our team worked hard to ensure that we understand those issues and overcome them for the new children's hospital. We have taken many lessons learned internationally and applied them to this project.