HSE board backs plan to close Navan hospital emergency department

The Health Service Executive board has given strong backing to continue with the organisation’s plan to close the emergency department at Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan.

At a private meeting on Wednesday, HSE chief executive Paul Reid and chief clinical officer Dr Colm Henry updated the board on developments in relation to the move, and it is understood they received strong reinforcements from the board to continue.

Mr Reid, who announced his intention to step aside as chief executive in December earlier this week, is understood to have told the board that concerns over resourcing in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda – which will receive more patients as a result of the closure in Navan – will be addressed.

It is understood the board expressed significant concern on patient safety and support for clinicians who favour the move. The reiteration of the board’s support for the HSE’s executive team comes amid a deepening rift between the political system and the healthcare service over plans for the closure of the ED.

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Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has highlighted a series of concerns over the plan, and has met clinicians in Drogheda, who wrote to him following their meeting and a request by the Minister for a note outlining their objections. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, within whose Meath East constituency the hospital is located, also has raised concerns.

Speaking on RTÉ's News at One on Wednesday, Dr Henry said clinicians in Navan and national clinical leads had expressed a “unanimous opinion” that the emergency department and intensive care unit in Navan is “not fit for purpose and unsafe and needs to be reconfigured”.

He said if Mr Donnelly directs the HSE to abandon the move, it will do so but he has “a duty to act on the absolute concerns expressed to me by clinicians in hospitals throughout that area, by the faculty of general practitioners in county Meath and by national clinical leads”.

He also said Ireland was in the middle of another wave of Covid-19 driven by Omicron subvariants of the virus. There were 776 people in hospital with the virus as of 8am on Wednesday, which represented an increase of 25 on the same time the day before. Of these, 31 people were in intensive care units, which was a daily increase of three.

According to the latest data from the HSE, 21 people have died with the virus over the past 14 days.