PROPOSED PLANS aimed at tackling the chronic overcrowding at Dublin’s maternity hospitals remain on ice because of the lengthy delay in publication of an independent, HSE-commissioned report.
The KPMG review of maternity and gynaecology services in the greater Dublin region began in June 2007 and was supposed to be made public last autumn but, almost a year later, the HSE has said it is still unable to specify a publication date.
And as the uncertainty over strategy and funding persists, concerns are growing that the Government will shelve expensive merger proposals because of the economic downturn.
There had been plans to relocate the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, to St Vincent’s Hospital while the Rotunda Hospital was expected to move to the new single site national children’s hospital at the Mater, when it is built. The Coombe Women’s Hospital had also outlined a €160 million plan to construct a new building on the site of St James’s Hospital. But the HSE has put these co-location projects on hold, pending the KPMG review.
Dr Michael Geary, the master of the Rotunda, said the report’s lengthy delay had engendered “a lot of scepticism and cynicism” among maternity services staff about whether such major infrastructure change remained a realistic prospect. He said a “major capital injection” was the only solution to the cramped conditions in the Rotunda, adding that this year about 9,000 mothers would deliver babies in a building that was designed to accommodate two-thirds that figure. A senior source within the Coombe Women’s Hospital said the relocation of the three Dublin maternity hospitals was a “vision rather than a reality”.
According to the HSE, however, the KPMG report is overdue because additional work was commissioned at a late stage. It said the “final draft of the review was delayed because during the drafting process, an extra piece of work to ensure the review was complete was found necessary to commission. This was done and has been added as an additional chapter,” it said.
“The draft is in the process of being presented to the stakeholders who took part in the review and it is hoped this will be completed during September and a more precise timeframe for publication will be decided after this,” it said.
Some medical sources also questioned why the HSE had not acted upon an earlier report carried out by the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Chaired by Prof John Higgins of the Cork University Maternity Hospital, The Future of Maternity and Gynaecology Services in Ireland 2006-2016, was presented as a blueprint for the improvement of maternity services nationally and was funded by the HSE.
And despite its publication back in January 2007, Prof Higgins claimed the HSE had so far implemented “very little” of the report. He said it was “disappointing” given that many of the review’s 68 recommendations could be “delivered without additional funding”. He also pointed out that potentially difficult industrial relations issues, thrown up by the report’s wide-ranging recommendations, had been resolved.
The HSE said last night that the report was “a valuable resource that has and will continue to inform its work on this subject nationwide” as it has begun a review of maternity and gynaecology services across the country. “This work is at an early stage,” it said.
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