Support the New Children's Hospital Alliance - Choose a Green Field Site!

The New Children's Hospital Alliance is a group composed of paediatric doctors, parents, past-patients and interested persons who are proposing that the National Children's Hospital's location be chosen in the best interest of sick children and their families. Thus we propose the National Children's Hospital be built on a 100-200 acre green-field site on Dublin's M50 ring road - to ensure optimum size, layout and support services for the sick children of Ireland and their families. A new maternity hospital should be physically linked to the children's hospital. A university medical presence with education and research facilities, and an adult hospital to complement the children's should be strategic phased developments on the campus. Accessible, with space for expansion and responsive to technological advances in medicine, such a campus would be fit- for- purpose, a centre of excellence, caring for the nation's sick children now and long into future generations.Let's go for it. Our principle aims are: The three Dublin children’s hospitals(Crumlin, Tallaght and Temple St.) will consolidate into one, to form the National Paediatric Hospital. The principal aim of this project is to build the right children’s hospital to meet the clinical needs of the children of the state. That means the right size and the appropriate configuration. No site that does not meet those criteria, irrespective of its medical synergies, research opportunities or access advantages, should be seriously considered. The most important co-location for children is for their hospital to be physically linked by corridor to a tertiary Maternity hospital. Because of the significant numbers of sick newborn children born annually such co-location is urgent and must take precedence over co-location with an adult hospital. Mothers with high-risk pregnancies where the baby is likely to need treatment in Intensive Care(c.550 per year) or specialist diagnostics would be referred to and delivered in this hospital. All nine McKinsey Report planning assessment criteria should be reviewed and weighted in importance relative to each other, with the addition of the criterion of co-location with a Maternity hospital. A validated and transparent scoring system must be used to compare sites. A “workable plan”(McKinsey report, p59) for the location of inpatient beds, secondary and emergency care(Secondary needs) for the Dublin region is required. In the unseemly rush in 2006 to name a site for the NPH such a plan was never considered. It must now be developed and made public by government before the NPH location is finalised. Ambulance transport times for emergencies from all over the Greater Dublin Area(GDA) to each potential NPH site must be available to inform the Review Group’s recommendations so that serious emergencies within the Greater Dublin Region(GDA) do not face unacceptable retrieval and transport time risks. Urgent Care Centres are not appropriate for Emergency Care delivery.(McKinsey p59), (RKW Part 1, p21). All Submissions, many of them very detailed, informed and expert from a wide variety of stakeholders– to the Location Group, to the Transition Group, to the RKW consultants, to the NPH Development Board and to An Bord Pleanála -should be available to the Review Group. The recommendations in several of these submissions have been almost totally ignored by various HSE/DoHC groups. Governance, budget and brand of the children’s hospital must remain identifiably independent of any adult hospital – as stressed by international comment within the McKinsey Report. The importance of the presence of the Universities and space for an on-site Academic Health Sciences Centre delivering basic, translational and clinical research and educational facilities must be promoted and facilitated. Research is the engine that drives clinical excellence and the magnet that draws the natural clustering of hospitals around academic centres worldwide. Here too is where multi-disciplinary, multi-professional and multi-hospital interaction occurs. The location decision, made in June 2006 without a Model of Care to inform it and widely believed to have been politically corrupted, was wrong for children in 2006 and is still wrong for children in 2012. The Model of Care developed and redeveloped ad hoc, and the proposed decanting of many services to the Tallaght site was driven by the constraints of the constricted Mater site, not by the needs of children. The 165,000 sq. metres proposed by the Review Group in its letter of 4th April 2012 to prospective ‘bidders’- as being the requirement for the NPH, a Maternity hospital and their expansion space- is not based on any agreed or informed Model of Care. Adult hospital co-location: The relentless promotion of this option by medico-political interests has damaged and held back the consideration of the broader needs of sick chiidren. NCHA accepts that Maternity hospitals should be co-located with adult hospitals to service mothers’ potential needs. NCHA further accepts that ideally the NPH should share a campus also with an adult hospital which has the potential in the future to complement the children’s hospital as national specialities migrate to the adult centre. This will require significant space for the adult hospital to expand as no adult hospital at present has all the requisite specialties NCHA does not accept the legitimacy of the sudden proliferation of claims of all so-called ‘clinical synergies’ between children’s and current Dublin adult institutions. Children are not small adults. Consultant posts structured with only minor parttime committment to children delay the development of the “breadth and depth ” of speciality expertise . Such posts should be a ‘thing of the past’. Children with rare diseases, contrary to what has been stated in Dáil Eireann, are referred, not to adult doctors but to children’s doctors who specialise in these rare conditions. Thus, children for liver transplantation go to the UK, not to the national adult liver transplant centre at St Vincent’s University hospital. Children with complex congenital tracheo -oesophageal problems go to children’s hospitals in Prague or Boston, etc.,etc. Indeed it could be argued that in the 21st century there is little or no place for ‘adult ‘doctors in a National Children’s Hospital serving the island of Ireland. It must again be emphasized that the major gain for children is in the coming together of the three children’s hospitals thus concentrating paediatric expertise and developing “breadth and depth” of service within the new hospital. So,could we please have a bit more balance in the current debate – we are meant to be concentrating on children’s needs not on the ambitions of various adult institutions. Access and travel times from outwith the GDA must not be unjustifiably prolonged or difficult for the many sick children in need of tertiary care. Car parking should have 2,500 spaces solely for the children’s hospital. This is not achievable in the city centre; so why put an elective ‘new build’ there, creating unnecessary hassle and distress for people? Finally, children would like, and use, natural green space around their hospital. Read more about the New Children's Hospital Alliance here: http://thenewchildrenshospital.ie