Reilly says HSE examining possible use of Mount Carmel as step-down facility

The HSE is examining whether the former Mount Carmel private hospital could be transformed into a step-down care facility, Minister for Health James Reilly has said.

At the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children yesterday, Dr Reilly suggested the examination could focus on whether the facility could provide rehabilitation services for older patients in particular who did not require further acute hospital care.

However the Minister said it would be the HSE and the Department of Health that would set down policy on how best to serve the people of the greater Dublin area, not individual hospitals or hospital managers.

He said St James’s Hospital may have had an interest or still had an interest in taking over Mount Carmel but it did not have the funds to run it as a going concern.

Dr Reilly acknowledged Mount Carmel had been used last year to provide care for some public patients as part of a HSE outsourcing arrangement. However, he said despite its closure, there was plenty of capacity in the private hospital system “to take up the slack”.

Dr Reilly again strongly defended the decision of the Government not to purchase Mount Carmel hospital. He said in the context of the Government’s aim to provide bilocated and trilocated facilities, “the acquisition of Mount Carmel as a stand-alone maternity hospital would, I believe, represent a retrograde step.

“I should also put on record my reservations regarding the low volume of births in the hospital. Best practice and the development of excellence in patient care and safety is predicated on a high volume of patient throughput. On the international front, there has been a clear move to close smaller maternity units and consolidate services into larger hospitals.

“As a doctor and as Minister for Health, my primary concern must be the provision of safe, high-quality care to patients. I can assure you that the provision of maternity services in a small, stand-alone maternity hospital or in a maternity unit within a non-acute setting does not constitute best practice nor does it represent safest practice, and clearly does not provide the level of safety and quality that our patients need.”

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation told the committee the hospital should reopen immediately as a healthcare facility to relieve overcrowding in public hospitals.