Madam, – Maurice Neligan and the signatories to a letter objecting to the Mater site for a new children’s hospital (July 30th) are trying to open wounds, not close them. I’m really trying to understand what it is about the site which aggravates them?
Is it really a lack of a garden in which to walk around (I don’t ever remember doing so in Crumlin where I attended with my son for 14 years)? Is it the suite of state-of- the-art-operating theatres which will be in the new hospital? Is it being able to move children swiftly from the new hospital to either the adult or the maternity hospital (also be on site) when emergency treatment might be required (as opposed to ferrying them across the city by ambulance, as now)?
Is it the fact that for the first time parents will be adequately catered for should their stay be critical and protracted?
Surely, it cannot be funds. Value for money is hugely important, but suggesting that a patching exercise on Crumlin for the foreseeable future amounts to value for money is folly.
So what exactly is it that these very eminent people have against the new hospital. I’ve respected them all from afar for years (who would not), but this attempt by them to give the Government reason to reconsider this project should, quite honestly, be heaped with scorn. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I was too late to join the 22 signatories of the letter (July 30th) supporting Maurice Neligan’s view that putting the national children’s hospital on the site of the Mater Hospital is bad policy. The authors have a right to be heard. They speak with conviction based on experience. Between them they have published over 1,500 papers on paediatric conditions, apart from textbooks and presidential addresses. They share international prestige. Maurice Neligan himself was the pioneer of open heart surgery for Irish children.
Great Ormond Street Hospital, the premier UK children’s hospital, has been freestanding since its foundation in 1852. In Liverpool, the history of the children’s hospital goes back to 1851 and it is about to be rebuilt again on an independent site. There are many other examples. Ireland’s paediatric requirements can be met appropriately and less expensively by engaging directly with the paediatric professionals. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Of all the arguments put forward to derail the project to offer sick children a world class facility, Maurice Neligan’s (HEALTHplus, July 27th) takes the biscuit. The proposition to wait “until the sun shines again” and make do with a relatively modest improvement at Crumlin is simply more of the same. For years up to around 2002 the approach at Crumlin was precisely that – let’s not go mad and aspire to world class facilities (or even worse rock the boat). The “fix a bit here and another bit there” approach failed our children. At least let us prevent this sort of thinking from failing our grandchildren.