asked the Minister for Health if he is satisfied that opening a single casualty unit in Beaumont Hospital is in the best interests of the patients; and the estimated cost in 1987 of this arrangement.
Ceisteanna — Questions. Oral Answers. - Beaumont Hospital Casualty Unit.
24.
The plans for transfer of services from St. Laurence's and Jervis Street Hospitals provide for certain outpatient clinics to open next month and for a phased relocation of the remaining outpatient and in-patient facilities during 1987. It is not envisaged that the casualty units at the two hospitals will be transferred and amalgamated at Beaumont until the inpatient facilities are operational.
Additional revenue costs will arise from the opening of the casualty unit at Beaumont. I have no doubt, however, that it will be capable of providing an improved service to patients.
Is the Minister aware that the consultants and the administrator of Jervis Street Hospital have expressed concern at the Minister's plan to open the outpatient's department, that it is not in the best interests of the patients? I am sure the Minister is aware that patients will have to travel to Beaumont Hospital and then into the centre of the city, to Jervis Street or St. Laurence's Hospital for X-rays and pathology? There will need to be a duplication of charts, or else charts will have to be transported, with the danger of loss. Would the Minister not accept that the best way to proceed on the opening of Beaumont Hospital would be to open the whole hospital as one major general teaching hospital for the north side of the city?
I can assure the Deputy that when the outpatient's clinics come into operation next month there will be quite a substantial number of consultants working in the hospital on an outpatient basis. I can also assure the Deputy that those consultants would not go to Beaumont Hospital if they thought that their patients, or any other patients, would be at risk. We intend to have an X-ray and, indeed, a pathology back-up available in the hospital at that time. The fears expressed for different reasons by some consultants who are attached to Jervis Street Hospital are not shared by the Royal College of Surgeons, by the medical officers of the Department of Health, by the Beaumont Hospital Board, which has a substantial medical presence on it, or by the board of the Richmond Hospital which equally has a substantial medical presence on it. I think we can move in this manner. In the case of many a hospital, that is the kind of phase opening structure which is done. I am quite sure those consultants would not wish me to say that because they have private practices in Merrion Square, and might be giving lectures simultaneously in the Royal College of Surgeons, the patients for whom they are caring are at risk. They would be at no greater risk in those circumstances than they would be while the consultants would be working in the outpatient's clinics at Beaumont.