Sir, – Citing fears of another superbug infection outbreak in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Prof Feargal Malone has called on the Minister for Health Simon Harris for an emergency interim development, stating that a new Rotunda Hospital at Connolly Hospital is 15 years away (News, November 14th).
The hoarding that surrounds the construction site of the national children’s hospital at St James’s Hospital has a picture of where the Coombe hospital might be at some unspecified time in the future. As the State’s largest provider of combined maternity, foetal medicine, neonatal and gynaecology services, there is a critical need to continue development on the current Coombe hospital site and to start the process of trilocation on St James’s for the critically ill babies who will need to be delivered in a Coombe hospital physically joined to the national children’s hospital.
And if that is not enough, Dr Peter Boylan recently told us on the Marian Finucane show that the nuns and the Government are still waiting for the go-ahead from the Vatican to proceed with the development of the National Maternity Hospital at St Vincent’s.
Meanwhile women and babies suffer and staff burn out. – Yours, etc,
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Prof CHRIS FITZPATRICK,
Consultant Obstetrician
and Gynaecologist,
Coombe Women and Infants
University Hospital,
Dublin 8.