John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)
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42. To ask the Minister for Health the position regarding the construction of the proposed national children’s hospital satellite centre in Tallaght. [40954/17]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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The new children’s hospital on a campus shared with St James’s Hospital will provide specialist and complex care for children and young people from all over Ireland, and with the Paediatric OPD and Urgent Care Centres at Connolly and Tallaght Hospitals, will be the regional hospital for the children of the Greater Dublin area, as well as Wicklow, Kildare and parts of Meath.

On 26 April 2017 the Government approved the investment required to enable the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board to award the construction contracts for the building of the main children’s hospital on the St James’s Hospital campus and the two Paediatric Outpatients and Urgent Care Centres on the Tallaght and Connolly Hospitals campuses. The construction contract for the building of the main children’s hospital and the satellite centres contract were signed in August. Confirmed dates for completion of the development of the new children's hospital and the paediatric outpatients and urgent care centres have now been agreed with the preferred contractor. The new children’s hospital will be completed by the middle of 2022. The Paediatric Outpatients and Urgent Care Centre at Connolly will open in 2019 followed by the second one at Tallaght in 2020 in advance of the opening of the main hospital in 2022. Site preparatory work has continued throughout the year and the construction phase of the project has now commenced.

The Paediatric Outpatient and Urgent Care Satellite Centres at Tallaght and Connolly Hospitals will improve geographic access to urgent care for children in the Greater Dublin Area. The two centres will support primary and community care through the provision of general community and paediatric clinics, including developmental paediatrics, multidisciplinary care for children with chronic stable conditions and other outpatient services. The centres will help to reduce Emergency Department and outpatient attendance at the new children’s hospital on a campus shared with St James’s.

Each Paediatric OPD and Urgent Care Centre will provide consultant-led urgent care, with 4-6 hour observation beds, appropriate diagnostics and secondary outpatient services including rapid access general paediatric clinics as well as child sexual abuse unit examination, observation and therapy rooms. Each centre is projected to deal with 25,000 urgent care and 15,000 outpatient attendances every year.

The centres will be open during the known busiest daytime and evening hours and closed during the night when departments are at their quietest. It is anticipated that the Paediatric OPD and Urgent Care Centres at Tallaght and Connolly will open from 08.00 to 24.00, diagnostic services from 08.00 to 20.00 and outpatient services from 08.00 to 18.00.