A DUBLIN hospital with 30 acres to spare has suggested to the Health Service Executive (HSE) that a centre which would carry out elective operations for the entire eastern region could be built on its campus.
Cappagh Hospital says if the €10 million project got the go-ahead, there would no longer be a need for the main Dublin hospitals to cancel elective surgery on a continuous basis when pressure on their emergency departments increased.
Aidan Gleeson, chief executive of Cappagh Hospital, said patients would be the ultimate beneficiaries as the new centre would reduce the number of cancellations in the acute hospitals as well as easing pressure on other hospital emergency departments, which would result in fewer patients on trolleys waiting for beds.
“We don’t have cancellations in Cappagh because we don’t have an accident and emergency department, and that is the key to all of this,” he said.
He also said outcomes for patients would be a lot better as operations would be carried out when they were supposed to be. Patients would also have a shorter length of stay in hospital.
He said the hospital already had 157 beds. All it needed was extra theatres.
“We need to go from four operating theatres to six,” he said.
The proposal had already been tentatively discussed with the HSE, he said, and while the money was not there at present, given the HSE’s capital funding had been “slashed”, it was a plan that needed to be looked at for the longer term.
Mr Gleeson was speaking at the official opening of a new isolation unit with 10 en suite rooms at the hospital yesterday by Health Minister Mary Harney.
Asked if she supported the proposal, Ms Harney said the HSE, through its new clinical affairs director Dr Barry White, was now discussing with clinicians more innovative ways of treating patients.
“In relation to surgery, clearly any suggestions he would make would be taken seriously by me and the HSE,” she said.
“It’s very disappointing that so many elective operations have to be cancelled because of other pressures in the hospitals from AE and more recently from the swine flu. So any innovative solution that can be found within the existing resource that can be made available will be supported,” she added.
Cappagh is an elective stand alone orthopaedic hospital but the new regional elective centre if provided would, Mr Gleeson said, carry out not just orthopaedics but all the other main elective procedures.