THE GOVERNMENT will proceed after all with the construction of a new €40 million block containing en-suite rooms for cystic fibrosis (CF) patients at Dublin’s St Vincent’s Hospital, Minister for Health Mary Harney announced last night.
She said developers would be asked to tender for the project in coming months but would not be paid any money until it was completed. The unit would be operational as early as possible in 2011, she said.
The HSE had said it wouldn’t have funding to begin construction on the facility until 2011 at the earliest, despite a promise last year that the facility would be built by 2010. News in recent days that it was not going to honour that promise had outraged CF patients and the Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland (CFAI).
The CFAI had launched a major campaign to get Ms Harney and the HSE to honour its 2008 commitment. About 18,000 people had texted “CHANGE” to 51155 since last Friday as part of the campaign.
Now Ms Harney says the project will proceed on the basis that payment will be made at the end of the construction phase. “This is a different way of funding this project as it involves the construction company financing the development up to the final phase of construction. The method previously envisaged for this project would have involved staged payments throughout the construction period,” she said.
“I am very pleased that an innovative way has been found to deliver this project. As I stated recently, in the current challenging environment we need to find new solutions and this is one of them. This project has always been a priority and never ceased to be so. I want to see it progressing now with urgency,” she added.
Ireland has the highest incidence of CF in the world and CF patients require single hospital rooms as they are more prone to picking up infections if accommodated on open wards.
The new unit at St Vincent’s will have 120 beds and about 30 of these will be in single rooms for CF patients. There will also be isolation facilities for patients with other conditions.
Sean O’Kennedy, CFAI chairman, said it was great news but he would have to digest the detail of Ms Harney’s announcement before commenting in detail. The HSE also welcomed the announcement.
Earlier, doctors treating patients with CF across the State had said the number of single rooms in Irish hospitals to treat the condition was grossly inadequate. They said international guidelines indicated there should be five single rooms for every 50 adults with the condition. However, there are just eight single rooms for CF patients at St Vincent’s Hospital – the national adult referral centre for adults with the condition – although there are about 300 CF patients attending there.
The specialists, in a statement issued through the Medical and Scientific Council of the Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland, also said the average severity of CF cases in the Republic was greater than that in other areas such as the North, the US and Canada and, therefore, there was a greater need for resources to treat cases here.
HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm told an Oireachtas health committee meeting last month that in Toronto, where there may be 600 CF patients, there were eight beds to treat them. “The system should be focused on getting people with CF treated in their homes rather than having them coming together at risk,” he said.