At its last meeting before Christmas, the Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly briefed his Cabinet colleagues that works would begin in the coming weeks on the site adjacent to St Vincent’s Hospital to prepare for the construction of a new National Maternity Hospital (NMH). A call to tender, Donnelly said, would issue in the first quarter of the new year.
About time. The gestation of such new hospital projects is often elephantine, but even by those standards, the move of the NMH to St Vincent’s has been a long-drawn out saga. And that is before brick is laid upon brick at the south Dublin site. The move was first mooted in the 1990s, and it is now a decade since then minister for health James Reilly secured Government agreement to fund the construction and the transfer from Holles Street. The losers in all this time are the women who have had to give birth to their babies in conditions that are sometimes crowded and frequently less than desirable.
Campaigners, including some prominent medical figures, have voiced fears that there would be a Catholic ethos in the new hospital, because of the legacy of religious control of St Vincent’s, itself founded by an order of Catholic nuns. They say that this could prevent certain treatments – legal in Ireland but not permitted under Church rules – from being made available to patients.
Both the Government and the vast majority of the staff of the NMH – who will, after all, be the ones providing care to patients in the new facility – have strongly rejected these suggestions. They are also denied by the authorities at St Vincent’s, the successors to the nuns. The Government has secured a 299-year lease on the site of the proposed new hospital to ensure its operational and clinical independence. The measures taken seem enough to ensure that this public facility will not be under private control or influence.
There is another danger to the public interest, however. The experience of the escalating costs at the new National Children’s Hospital must serve as a constant warning to those responsible for the delivery of the NMH project. The total cost of construction and fitting out of the new facility beside St James’ Hospital – first approved by Government with a cost of less than half a billion euro, is now expected to top ¤2 billion, and could go significantly higher than that.
The move of the NMH to St Vincent’s must be closely supervised and its costs rigorously controlled, with systems in place to ensure transparency and accountability. The Government should be up-front and open about the costs from day one. The Children’s Hospital has been an appalling example of the State’s failure to manage a large project and the taxpayer has predictably ended up on the hook. There can be no repeat with the new NMH.