Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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132. To ask the Minister for Health further to Parliamentary Question No. 100 of 12 July 2022, if the examination by his Department of the HSE’s strategic assessment report regarding the new emergency department in University Hospital Galway has been completed to date; the status of the updated preliminary business case; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [52191/22]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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The new Emergency Department (ED) and Women & Children’s block for University Hospital Galway (UHG) is a large and complex proposal. It is in the early stages of design development under the Public Spending Code (PSC) lifecycle.

The updated PSC aims to ensure that maximum value for money can be achieved for the taxpayer through disciplined project evaluation, preparation and implementation. The PSC outlines the processes, decision gates, and requirements at each of those gates for capital investment proposals in excess of €100m. The requirements of each of these stages must be comprehensively addressed in order to receive approval-in-principle to proceed to the next stage of the PSC.

The original proposal was for a new multi-story ED block at an estimated cost of €65-€120m. However, as a result of service-led demands, there has been very significant increase in the scale and ambition for the Galway site and the proposal now incorporates a new ED, a new Maternity Department, and a new Paediatric Department, and would likely require capital investment in the order of hundreds of millions of euro.

In the meantime, an interim ED, which can serve as enabling work for the larger proposal, was substantially completed in July 2022 and, after a commissioning/equipping/training phase, opened earlier this month- over the weekend of 8-9 October. This interim ED has more capacity with 43-patient bays compared to 34-bays in the pre-COVID ED. It will also provide 43 single, closed cubicles and extra resuscitation bays, providing greater dignity and privacy for patients.

The ambition for the proposal at UHG and the investment required is therefore not insignificant. Investment decisions must be clearly linked to core national policy objectives. The Strategic Assessment Report for this proposal is still being reviewed to determine its alignment with the various national strategies and policies that the proposal crosscuts. It is expected that this will be concluded in coming weeks.

Once the Departmental review of the SAR is complete, it will be submitted to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) for review. If DPER finds that the SAR provides a basis to proceed, approval to develop the proposal by means of a Preliminary Business Case at Decision Gate 1 of the PSC can be granted.