Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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Good progress is being made on the national children's hospital. I spoke to the contractors on-site in the past few weeks and they believe they will finish their build at the end of quarter 1 of 2024. Some of the commissioning happens in parallel with the build and final commissioning happens when the build has been handed over. The HSE believes it can have children in the hospital as patients in the second half of 2024. The contractors’ timeline came with the caveat we would all expect, which is that we are in uncertain times, given we have been living with Covid, war in Europe and so forth, but that is their intention.

It is an extraordinarily impressive build and it really is going to mark a new departure for healthcare provision for children. The hospital will have more than 6,000 rooms and, within that, it will include 39 clinical specialties, all in the one location. There will be 380 inpatient beds and the rooms are single-room occupancy with large windows and beds for parents. It is state-of-the-art and very impressive in terms of care for children and supporting their families as well. There will be 93 day beds, 60 critical care beds, 110 outpatient examination rooms, 22 operating theatres and procedure rooms and a 300-seat lecture theatre, given this will be a teaching hospital. The corridor that the operating theatres are on is a sight to behold; it runs the full length of the hospital and each of the operating theatres is state-of-the-art. The difference they will make is huge.

Work on the main site is progressing well and the building phase is nearing 80% complete. The focus through this year has been the internal fit-out. The most advanced areas now have finished floors, walls, ceilings and joinery, such as nursing stations installed, and equipment and rooms in clinical areas are now discernible. Other areas such as the emergency department, imaging, critical care and therapy areas are progressing at pace. The external scaffolding is now coming down with the completion of glazing, and the external façade and the very large glass biome over the central staircase is nearing completion. The first rooms have been completed, with the other 4,600 rooms to follow in a sequenced manner in the coming months. That is where progress is with the hospital.

We had a useful conversation on the State Claims Agency last week. As the Deputy rightly said, the numbers have been increasing. There are two schemes which I get information on: one is the clinical indemnity scheme and the other is the general indemnity scheme, that is, CIS and GIS. Clinical indemnity, as the Deputy would expect, is a lot larger.

Between 2010 and last year, that grew from about €78 million to about €358 million. I was looking through the additional briefing the committee received and it is very useful. For example, it identifies the main clinical areas in recent years, of which obstetrics accounts for nearly half of the claims. The note also points out that the volume of claims remains broadly constant and that the awards are going up significantly to account for inflation and rates of return. Those are some of the drivers.

As we discussed last week, there is a concerted effort required, first and foremost, to address patient safety issues. All of this is simply a financial manifestation of patient safety issues and we have to make sure those issues are identified and eliminated. The HSE does ongoing work on that. We need to keep the focus on it and look at implementing other mechanisms as well, as opposed to taking only the judicial or State claims route.