Maternity Hospitals to rellocate
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Maternity hospitals advised to relocate
Services cannot cope with number of youths seeking helpEITHNE DONNELLAN, Health CorrespondentALL THREE maternity hospitals in Dublin should move from their current sites and be located on the same campuses as acute hospitals, an independent report has recommended.
The report, compiled by KPMG which was commissioned by the Health Service Executive to review maternity services in the capital, states that the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street should move to the site of Dublin’s St Vincent’s Hospital, that the Coombe Women’s Hospital should move onto the site of Tallaght Hospital and that the Rotunda should move in due course to the Mater Hospital campus.
The report, details of which have been obtained by The Irish Times, concludes that the three maternity hospitals are all very confined on their present sites and do not have room to expand to deal with the huge increase in births they have had to contend with in recent years. Last year each of them dealt with more than 8,000 births and this year the Rotunda and Holles Street are expected to deal with more than 9,000 deliveries.
The report says it is international best practice to have maternity hospitals co-located with large acute hospitals so they can share expertise.
Senior staff at the three maternity hospitals have been briefed by the HSE on the report’s contents and the HSE board is due to consider the report at its meeting next month. It will then be published.
Its findings are expected to be welcomed by the maternity hospitals which have been anxious to move for some time. Last month the master of the Coombe Hospital, Dr Chris Fitzpatrick, confirmed the board of his hospital had told the HSE it would be prepared to sell its current site to finance a move which would see it co-locating with Tallaght hospital. He said the plan was supported by Tallaght and St James’s Hospitals with which the Coombe shares staff and patients.
Holles Street has also had a long-held view that it needed to relocate to the site of an acute hospital and St Vincent’s Hospital had agreed in principle as far back as 2006 to its relocation there.
There had also been an expectation that the Rotunda would move to the single site national children’s hospital at the Mater, when it is was built.
It is not clear if there is any definite timescale for the hospitals to move, though in each case the moves could be expected to take a number of years. Dr Fitzpatrick said last month he anticipated the Coombe’s move to Tallaght could be completed, if approved, within five years.
Neither is it clear whether there will be funding to implement the report’s proposals in the current economic climate. However, both the Coombe and Holles Street have looked at selling their sites to raise money to partially fund their relocation.
There is also some discussion in the KPMG report on sub-specialisation and on which of the maternity hospitals should deal with reproductive medicine, gynaecological cancers and high- risk foetal medicine.
The KPMG review of maternity and gynaecology services in the greater Dublin region began in June 2007 and while it was expected to be completed earlier this year it’s understood it was delayed as a result of a decision to commission at a late stage a study of population trends in each area.
The HSE has confirmed the KPMG report has been completed and said it was “communicating with key stakeholders seeking feedback on the review” before it is published in coming weeks.
© 2008 The Irish Times
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As I said elsewhere, allowing Mountjoy to be developed for anything but medical use is a big mistake, this is one of the few reasonably central sites that could be developed as a medical district, the Rotunda and Beaumont should be moved here. Now how to redevelop the Rotunda site: obviously this has huge potential as a cultural area.
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It could work if they managed to do a mixed use with a reduced resi/retail component to wash the face of the jail relocation; I like the idea of the anti-social being flung to the margins whilst the vulnerable are located in what may if metro stacks up have the best connectivity possible.
What really exites me though would be the demolition of all the poor quality buildings in Parnell Square and the idea of the original Rotunda becoming a six star hotel. Hospitals are useful but you don’t want them quite as centrally located as the Rotunda wheras a really flash hotel could act a serious catalyst to drag this area from its knees.
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It seems strange that these hospitals are at capacity. They were built at a time when most women had at least 8 children.
Are there really more kids being born nowadays than then? -
@Blisterman wrote:
It seems strange that these hospitals are at capacity. They were built at a time when most women had at least 8 children.
Are there really more kids being born nowadays than then?most of those eight where born at home though
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A Plan by an overcrowded maternity hospital in Dublin to expand has been slammed as “an absolute monster” by angry residents.
The National Maternity Hospital (NMH) at Holles Street in Dublin 2 has applied to the city council for a six-storey extension adjoining the existing unit.
However, a number of objections have been lodged with the local authority over the plans.
if its moving why the extension?
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@lostexpectation wrote:
http://www.herald.ie/national-news/city-news/monster-new-maternity-unit-gets-goahead-1816018.html
permission grantedHerald was the only media organ to cover either this or the developments re the renewed push for the cable car/ suas.
Evening Herald is much better these days for Dublin/ planning stories than the Irish Times – which is really a remarkable indictment as to how shite and irrelevant that the IT have come for Dublin planning matters!! 😮
PS Also stories re UCD campus expansion controversies in current Herald – again not covered by IT as far as I know…
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@hutton wrote:
Herald was the only media organ to cover either this or the developments re the renewed push for the cable car/ suas.
Evening Herald is much better these days for Dublin/ planning stories than the Irish Times – which is really a remarkable indictment as to how shite and irrelevant that the IT have come for Dublin planning matters!! 😮
PS Also stories re UCD campus expansion controversies in current Herald – again not covered by IT as far as I know…
Maybe the Irish Times is finally taking seriously its status as a NATIONAL newspaper, and leaves Dublin planning stories to Dublin newspapers. I’ve never seen much coverage relating to projects in Cork or Limerick in the Irish Times.
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Eh Rumple, Marmajam may have been referring to your use of caps on the cable cars thread… Why don’t you dig how beautiful it is out here? 🙂
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Btw I don’t know how you missed out on the significant coverage that I Times often gave projects such as Limerick tunnel in the past – my point being the general decline in that paper in terms of coverage of of all planning stories, and also Dublin stories – resulting in Dublin planning stories suffering a double whammy… Dublin region does only contain about 1/3 the population, you know 😉
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Holles Row behind is a pleasant street of Dublin Artisans’ Dwellings Company houses of c. 1890.
Houses in original condition are as rare as hen’s teeth alas.
What a delight.
I ended up chatting to three women residents sunning themselves here for the best part of an hour a few weeks ago. The picture they painted of what they put up with regarding deliveries and waste collection from the hospital (the entire rear boundary of which forms the other side of their narrow street) was extraordinary. Collections operating six days a week from 8am, often outside designated hours, giant trucks backing up against their tiny houses, the consistent inadequacy of public representatives and the Gardai in sorting things out, the despair of the drivers themselves in having to disrupt the residents and operating in certain ways etc etc… And everything conceivable comes out of the entrances – recycling waste, medical waste, coffins, hearses, commercial waste, food waste, with a massive increase in recent years. It sounded horrific.
One can certainly understand their concerns in respect of the height of this new extension, rising from a current single-storey height across a standard width road from them, to six storeys. All of their sun also comes from here. Otherwise it would appear the extension would improve the street considerably, which is currently little more than a semi-industrial backland. The ladies didn’t seem to agree. I wasn’t going to fight, with there being Coors Light in the mix.
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@hutton wrote:
Btw I don’t know how you missed out on the significant coverage that I Times often gave projects such as Limerick tunnel in the past – my point being the general decline in that paper in terms of coverage of of all planning stories, and also Dublin stories – resulting in Dublin planning stories suffering a double whammy… Dublin region does only contain about 1/3 the population, you know 😉
Maybe it does. But you mightn’t realize that the rest of the country contains 2/3 of the population and gets a bit sick of all their newspapers and national TV coverage being centred on Dublin, considering they’re mostly paid for by people who don’t live in Dublin. I really don’t think the reorganization of local hospitals in Dublin is a story which demands extensive coverage in a national newspaper.
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what?
without dublin there’d be no rest of the country, be like Zimbabwe down there. -
@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
I really don’t think the reorganization of local hospitals in Dublin is a story which demands extensive coverage in a national newspaper.
Lol. You must be either working for RTÉ or the Irish Times with an attitude like that.
Would Noel O’Gara be somebody you admire?
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@hutton wrote:
Lol. You must be either working for RTÉ or the Irish Times with an attitude like that.
Would Noel O’Gara be somebody you admire?
That’s not a very good retort to a valid point. You’d probably prefer the Sunday Independent in any case which specialises in that kind of snide mockery.
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@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
That’s not a very good retort to a valid point.
good job he wasn’t retorting to a valid point so.
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The Limerick city boundary extension is far more important for Limerick, and the country, than the use of local hospitals in Dublin. How much coverage has that received in the national media?
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getting back to the centralisation of hospitals:
it’d be an interesting exercise to apply the HSE’s proposals for Cork/Kerry to Dublin.
the hse propose centralising most acute care in one hospital in cork: Cork University Hospital, while the other hospitals in the area: Kerry General, Bantry General, Mercy, South Infirmary and Mallow do mainly elective procedures and step down.
Cork and Kerry have a large geographical area and a population of approximately 481,295 in cork and 139, 835 in kerry, plus tertiary services to rest of munster. (total cork and kery 621,130) (cso 2006 census)
apply that to dublin (pop 1,187, 176) and that leaves you with 2 acute hospitals.
currently you have connolly-blanchardstown, beaumont, mater, st james’, st vincent’s and tallaght as the large acute teaching hospitals.which ones would you elevate to main centres and which ones would you downgrade, from a spatial development/ease of reallocation point of view?
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Indeed clearly. long term, all Dublin’s hospitals should be moved to a one or two campuses, internationally this sort of centralization produces by far the best outcomes and gives the best support for medical research: one complex spread across Mater/Mountjoy/Holles St/possibly the Rotunda, the other around either St Vincents or Tallaght. The number of medical schools should be reduced as well; to two for sure, if possible to one.
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Not sure where to stick this and didn’t want to start a new thread- but the scaffolding is down on the facade restoration of 60 Lower Mount Street which I presume is part of the Maternity Hospital?
As long as I can remember previously it was one of the finest budliea plantations on D2.
Hope you fancy snappers will be hotfooting it down there over the coming days and be reporting back
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