primary healthcare centres Dublin

Anything on public centres or private centres likeTouchstone who bought a number fo sites

Well there are a few. Ballally, Ballymun, Baggot St Community Hospital (the latter a great shame that the HSE will put no money into maintaining the building. Lovely tiles in hall – one broke, and is replaced by CEMENT!)

There’s one in Ranelagh built/owned by the Drs McMahon. Lots of complaints about the building, soudproofing etc. My experience of design in Irish health is it’s crap. Doors not wide enough for hospital beds etc. But also the design decisions! A care of the elderly facility should not be built using plans from an oncology centre!

And anyway – as a health worker – the primary care centres ccannot work. GPs are supposed to be part of the teams – but GPs are self-employed and lose money if they go to meetings. Plus they are not teams, just a conglomeration of different health professions working in the same building.

Typical HSE crap.

Sorry for the rant, bricky – I’ve worked in the HSE for 20 years and it still infuriates me. What was it that you wanted to know?

But if GPs were allocated funding per patient they would need to go to a lot of meetings.

The UK experiment of attempting to remove the ‘professional management layer’ and have doctors manage patients is clearly untried but may produce a clearer answer as to who is best to manage health outcomes. If successful it may have very interesting architectural consequences as GPs agglomerate to provide 24 * 7 cover in purpose built facilities.

In theory they seemed liek a good idea. If they brought savings to the “current expenditure” side of the HSE budget why aren’t we seeing more of them rolling out? Also some of the headline companies in this sector like Touchstone don’t seem to be making it work in practice. Where is that programme going??