Location of National Children’s Hospital

Fact: The Mater site is already heavily congested with insufficient parking for current hospital facilities. This is the same for staff, visitors and patients.

Fact: Regardless of current congestion in the area, the Mater location is not convenient for the vast majority of people in Ireland.

Fact: The Mater is not an HSE hospital.

Given the above facts, surely the Mater is clearly NOT appropriate. In my humble opinion, criteria for the location of a National hospital of any kind should include:

Any new public facility should be in a location which is convenient and easily accessible for the majority of people attending, using either private or public transport. Any such facility should include adequate parking provision for staff, visitors and patients. The location should have good access roads, with traffic volumes and consequence factored-in. It should facilitate ease of access for emergency vehicles with due consideration to route planning and congestion in vicinity / en-route.

Given that a National hospital should be a ‘public facility’; it should be owned, funded, managed and maintained completely through public ownership. At present, this would mean an HSE establishment.

Indeed, there are many voluntary hospitals in Ireland who receive considerable amounts of their funding from the HSE. I would go so far as to propose that given their origins and aims to provide healthcare to all and anyone who needs it on the basis of need, that the owning charities and foundations be given the opportunity to ‘gift’ the facility to the public and that the facilities be taken into public ownership.

After all, when these hospitals are majority funded by the HSE, yet are allowed to run ‘outside’ of HSE policy, this detracts from the effectiveness of any HSE national / public healthcare planning. Importantly, many facilities were established as charitable facilities because there was no such public facility at the time. Their origins were to provide the public with healthcare and this same ethos is now best maintained by handing them over to the public healthcare system.

Zebedee