THE GOVERNMENT should look at the possibility of using new co-located private hospitals planned for a number of public hospital sites around the country for the treatment of all patients with specific diseases such as cancer, a conference in Dublin heard yesterday.
Frank Sullivan, professor of radiation oncology at the National University of Ireland Galway and medical director of the department of radiation oncology at Galway's University College Hospital, told delegates attending a conference on private healthcare that the co-located facilities as currently planned would merely deliver more general hospitals.
He believed there were enough general hospitals already and the idea of housing the State's recently designated cancer centres in the new co-located facilities should be looked at instead.
"So if we decamp all the cancer patients into one wing of the hospital that happens to be privately developed in a rapid way . . . those number of patients that would be grouped in that facility would be far more rapidly and more efficiently and better handled in that facility and therefore would free up a lot of the space in the public hospital," he said.
This would be a better use of the space on which the co-located hospitals were being built, he argued.
Michael Cullen, chief executive officer of the Beacon Medical Group - which has won tenders to build co-located hospitals on the grounds of Cork University Hospital, Beaumont Hospital and the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick - told delegates that the new facilities would be open by 2011 if planning permission were granted. He said the three would be built at a cost to Beacon of €800 million and they would provide over 700 beds.
The cost to Beacon would rise to over €1 billion if it is successful in the tender for a fourth co-located facility on the grounds of Tallaght Hospital, he added.
He said the co-located hospitals would be obliged to admit privately insured patients coming through the public hospital A&E departments 24 hours a day and if they refused, they could face substantial fines and possible eviction.
Minister for Health Mary Harney told the conference she saw private healthcare providers as supplementing the public service and not supplanting it.