I thank the Ceann Comhairle for selecting this matter for the Adjournment debate and I welcome the opportunity of raising the conditions at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin. I put it to the Minister that it is crucial that the hospital has the capacity and capability to deliver the quality of paediatric service that is required in the twenty-first century. The Pollock report, an analysis of facilities provision at the hospital authored by Dr. Ronnie Pollock, MPA Health Strategy and Planning, was published last December. Its conclusion states:
The defects and deficiencies in the hospital are very great indeed, and this after heroic efforts over the years to expand and improve facilities. I can see hardly any scope for improvement through "patching" the present framework, and absolutely no way in which currently accepted standards can be provided. The hospital is seriously outdated. It should be replaced.
The hospital contains two groups of wards: the four storey block wards and single storey provision. The report states:
The "block" wards provision is seriously inadequate. The facilities provided for bed areas and the supportive facilities are all seriously below accepted standards and many functions now regarded as fundamental to an effective ward are not provided at all. There are virtually no facilities for parents and relatives, either in the form of rest rooms and refreshment facilities or in provision for overnight stay beside an ill child.
The Intensive Care provision is located in the Ward Block and it is very limited. The main 6-bedded unit's layout is poor with most of the available space clinically unusable, and the configuration fails to provide many of the key supporting facilities . . .
Some additional ITU capacity is situated elsewhere in the block in St. Patrick's Ward which is however a mixture of an Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU) and a High Dependency Unit (HDU). It shares the space defects and absence of essential accommodation seen in the main unit. The two units are widely separated, creating additional problems in staffing and supervision.
I pay special tribute to the staff, who have worked so brilliantly under the current conditions, to the management, who are continuing to do excellent work at the hospital despite its facilities, and to the New Crumlin Hospital Group, the parents' lobby for the redevelopment of the hospital. They are doing excellent work. I ask the Minister to respond quickly and favourably and get things under way.
Like the outpatients department, the accident and emergency department mirrors the defects of the hospital as a whole. The report states:
[T]he clinical functions have insufficient area to work efficiently, the staff and relatives provision is very poor, and many areas which are standard provision for an Accident and Emergency Department are totally absent. The net area . . . is about 400 [sq. m.]. A department carrying this workload would expect to have an area of about 900 [sq. m.].
The department is less than half the size required to carry out the duties of an accident and emergency department efficiently. In terms of diagnostic facilities, there is neither imaging nor pathology which matches up to current standards. The report states: "In Imaging all the diagnostic rooms are too small, staff provision is minimal and, in a hospital with a tertiary role in neurology and oncology, there is no MRI."
The hospital was built in the early 1950s and was conceived as much as two decades before that, so we are really talking about a 1930s hospital that was planned 70 years ago. According to the report, "It is its misfortune that during this period the whole social and philosophical climate surrounding child health care has changed more than that in any other field of medicine." When I was in hospital as a young child, practically nobody was allowed in. One's parents were allowed in once a week. That has totally changed, and for the better. The report goes on to state:
At the time of the hospital's origins, it was the norm for parents to give their sick child, in trust, into the care of the hospital and to visit the child on a limited basis. The change to the present day position could hardly be greater with parents participating actively in their child's care and spending virtually unlimited time with them. . . [T]he existing hospital is not well geared to that approach. . .
I ask the Minister to respond favourably and move ahead quickly in providing funding for a new hospital.
