€300m maternity hospital plan ‘is now under threat’
Consultants told viability is at risk as green light should have been given six months ago
PLANS for the new €300m national maternity hospital are in jeopardy, it emerged yesterday.
The delay in giving the go-ahead for work to start at the site — the campus of St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin — is now a matter of grave concern, warned hospital deputy chairman Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns.
Approval for the works was taken over from the HSE by the Department of Health and is currently with Health Minister Simon Harris, he said.
But the green light should have been given six months ago, he told the annual meeting of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) yesterday.
Work on the pharmacy and car park must be started by the end of the year to comply with EU law on European energy requirements for new buildings.
“If this does not happen it will fold and we will be back to square one,” he said.
The deadline for the goahead was October 1 and it has not happened, causing “grave concern”, Mr Justice Kearns added. It would be an absolute tragedy if the project was delayed and the viability put at risk, he stressed.
Work needs to begin before the end of the year, otherwise the whole design will need to be redrawn.
He said the delay in approval dated back to the time the minister decided to refer the case of the late Malak Thawley, who died in Holles Street undergoing surgery for ectopic pregnancy, to the Health Information and Quality Authority for inquiry.
A High Court challenge taken by the hospital to the grounds for inquiry found the referral was unreasonable.
“We were completely vindicated and we are at a complete loss to understand the delay,” said Mr Justice Kearns.
He added that officials from the Department of Health had stopped coming to planning meetings on the new hospital after the legal proceedings were lodged earlier this year and they had not yet returned.
He suggested there was a view that the department had an “animus” towards the hospital for taking the case.
And he appealed to the minister to grant approval for it to go ahead in light of the suggestion that the health service will get substantial funding in the Budget.
The current National Maternity Hospital building in Holles Street is out of date and unfit for purpose.
A spokeswoman for Mr Harris said work was ongoing on issues of governance and protections for the State investment and he would update the Government shortly.
Meanwhile, it has also emerged that the first satellite centre of the new national children’s hospital — located in Connolly Hospital in the constituency of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar — may also not be able to open as scheduled next June because of a lack of consultants.
The centre, which includes an urgent-care unit and outpatients’ section, is part of the national children’s hospital, to be located in St James’s Hospital, which is currently under construction and due to be ready in 2022.
Secretary general of the IHCA Martin Varley said there were already problems in recruiting enough paediatric consultants for jobs which had been advertised for the centre.
He linked the difficulties to the failure to address pay gaps which will mean newly recruited consultants still earn 30pc less than longer-serving colleagues, even when catchup measures announced recently are implemented.
Meanwhile, IHCA president Dr Donal O’Hanlon warned that patients were at risk of going blind because of dangerous delays in access to eye surgery.
Dr O’Hanlon revealed that 6,000 patients are now waiting to see an eye specialist in Cork, with potentially serious consequences for their sight.