In a new report, the board of Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin has called for a review of the decision to locate the new national children's hospital on the campus of Dublin's Mater hospital.
The board has also urged the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the Department of Health to reconsider the possibility of building the hospital, into which Dublin's three existing children's hospitals are to be merged, on a greenfield site where there would also be room to accommodate a maternity hospital and an adult hospital.
The report, which has been released to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act, essentially says that the Mater site is too small and could lead to services being fragmented rather than brought together on one site, which is the purpose of the new hospital. Furthermore, it says it believes there will be insufficient room for car parking at the Mater site. It is also concerned that there won't be sufficient space for enough single rooms or for facilities for parents to stay with their sick children.
Some 700 families using Crumlin hospital were surveyed for the report and 81 per cent of these had travelled to the hospital by car. This pointed to the need for adequate car parking.
"The site allocated for the children's hospital is less than one-quarter of the site of the present Crumlin hospital site and is approximately 0.5 hectares larger then the current Temple Street site," the report states.
It also says that while the Mater site was chosen on the basis that it could accommodate the development of the hospital in a shorter timeframe than other sites, it is unlikely that the original timescale of having the hospital built and open at the Mater by 2011 will be met.
The report was prepared by the board of Crumlin hospital with input from Tony Donoghue, health facility planner with Hok International UK, and Brian Cullen of Cullen Payne Architects, Dublin, both of whom were involved in drawing up the development control plan for a new children's hospital in Crumlin before the decision was made to amalgamate all the paediatric hospitals on one site.
Staff at Crumlin who consulted with other children's hospitals in Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne and London also had an input into the report.
Having reviewed the Mater site, the report concludes: "The board does not consider that the site . . . has the potential to deliver a facility which can comply with the optimum level of care. In this regard the board's main concerns relate to size/space and accessibility to the Mater site. As a result, the board considers that there is a risk of this opportunity to provide a world-class children's hospital being lost and is suggesting that the decision to locate on this site at the Mater hospital be reviewed.
"The board recommend that the location of a new hospital on a greenfield site be reconsidered as being the best option to deliver the optimal model of care and service delivery at competitive cost and in a reasonable timeframe."
The decision to base the hospital at the Mater was endorsed by the Government earlier this year following a review of paediatric services by consultancy firm McKinsey & Co, which said that the new hospital should be co-located with an adult teaching hospital.
However, Dr Pat Doherty, chairman of the medical board at Crumlin, said the first priority should be co-locating with a maternity hospital, as this would mean an end to the "extremely fraught exercise" of transporting babies who are little over a pound in weight from maternity hospitals to children's hospitals for surgery or investigation. He also said the Mater site was selected without any significant consultation with the existing children's hospitals and it would end up with fewer beds than exist for children at present, at a time when the population was growing.
A spokesman for the HSE said it had received the report and had met the hospital to discuss it. "The HSE shares the aspirations and vision for children as set out in the report and is fully confident that they can be catered for within the site that has now been selected at the Mater hospital location," he said.