THE MUCH-HERALDED new regional hospital for the northeast is unlikely to be seen for several years after the Health Service Executive (HSE) said it will have to be accommodated in the next national development plan.
The HSE statement confirmed what the Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said last year when Navan was announced as the location for the new hospital, that “there is not a red cent in the exchequer”, to pay for it.
The Irish Nurses’ Organisation responded by saying the plan for healthcare in the region was “half-assed”.
Fine Gael said it would scrap the HSE’s current plan to restructure the acute hospital care in the northeast and instead draw up a new patient-centred plan.
“When Fine Gael is in government and James Reilly is minister for health I will be calling on him to scrap the current plan,” said the party’s Meath TD Shane McEntee.
“I want it in our manifesto for the next general election because we need a way forward for health care in the northeast. At the moment patients here feel they have been abandoned.”
The hospital is one of three crucial parts in a plan to reconfigure services in the northeast region prepared for the HSE by consultants Teamwork Management.
It was published in 2006 and said the system then in place, with five acute hospitals providing services, was exposing patients to increased risks. Teamwork concluded that this configuration was not serving the community well, was unsustainable and had to change.
Since then the HSE has been centralising all acute services in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda and Cavan General Hospital, and the building of the new regional hospital on a greenfield site was the next important step.
Mr McEntee said the plan was flawed “and the northeast, one of the fastest-growing population centres in the country is left without a proper service. We need a new plan.”
According to a HSE spokeswoman: “The new regional hospital will have to be accommodated in the capital plan following on from the current [2009–2013] one, if an alternative means of funding such as PPP is not identified in the meantime.”
She also said that the site selection “will take place following resolution of a funding mechanism”.
In the meantime, “the focus of current efforts and funding are to progress the restructuring of acute services from five into two hospital sites in the northeast area within the shortest possible timeframes to address the identified service delivery and risk issues,” she added.
INO industrial relations officer Tony Fitzpatrick said: “I cannot see in the prevailing climate any political will on the part of the HSE to drive the new hospital. It will be well past 2013 if it is built at all.”
He said the Lourdes and Cavan general hospitals could not cope with the pressure they were already under and with more services expected to be transferred there in the coming months, “this is more like a half-assed plan than a strategy, its like ‘let’s just patchwork something together’ and it is not thinking of patients first.”