Michael McCarthy (Cork South West, Labour)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

148. To ask the Minister for Health his views on correspondence (details supplied) regarding the national children's hospital; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [34891/15]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The National Paediatric Hospital Development Board is the statutory body responsible for planning, designing, building and equipping the new children's hospital. The new hospital will be co-located with St. James's Hospital, and ultimately tri-located with the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital, which will re-locate to the campus in due course. Satellite centres of the hospital, providing urgent and outpatient care, are to be built on the campuses of Connolly and Tallaght Hospitals.

The Government's decision that the new children's hospital should be co-located with St. James's on its campus in Dublin 8 was clinically led. In 2006 McKinsey report, Children’s Health First, which recommended that the population of Ireland and projected demand could support only one world-class tertiary paediatric centre, that this should be in Dublin and ideally be co-located with a leading adult academic hospital, to ensure relevant sub-specialty and academic linkages. The McKinsey report recognised the importance for quality of healthcare of having a critical mass of sub-specialist skills in a tertiary centre and stated this could be achieved firstly, by serving a large enough population to support a full complement of sub-specialists and secondly by co-locating with an adult teaching hospital thus enabling access to specialties that encompass both adult and paediatric patients, facilitating clinical and academic “cross fertilisation”, and attracting the top staff. A number of subsequent reviews and reports on this project over the years since 2006, most recently the 2012 Dolphin report, reaffirmed the importance of co-location with a major adult academic teaching hospital. This was a critical factor in the Government’s decision in November 2012 that the new hospital should be co-located with St. James’s, as the hospital with the widest range of clinical specialties and national services from an adult perspective, and an excellent and well established research and education culture and infrastructure.

On 10 August 2015 the NPHDB submitted a planning application to An Bord Pleanála and, subject to planning, it is hoped to be on site at all three locations in early 2016. During the design process, there were extensive consultations with families, young people and children who are former or current users of the service, with staff of the existing hospitals, with clinical leads and with local residents. This process has led to the development of a world-class building which has been designed to enable staff to deliver the best possible clinical care for children and young people, while also seeking to provide a pleasant environment for staff and families. All in-patient accommodation will be in single en-suite rooms, with in-room parent accommodation, while the planning application also includes a family hostel to be located on the campus. The main hospital on the St. James’s campus will have 1,000 basement car spaces as well as excellent public transport connections, and a Mobility Management Plan is being introduced on the hospital campus to manage the increase in traffic associated with the new children's hospital. A 3D walkthrough of the hospital can be seen on www.newchildrenshospital.ie while the complete planning application can be viewed on nchplanning.ie. There is also a drop-in centre at 568 South Circular Road where a 3D model can be seen.