Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 19 January 2022
1598. Deputy Matt Shanahan asked the Minister for Health further to recent media reports regarding developing a policy to build a new elective hospital in Cork city, the provisional number of beds being considered; the provisional budget associated with construction and delivery; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [1069/22]
View answerA new National Elective Ambulatory Care Strategy was agreed by Government on 21 December 2021. This new strategy aims to change the way in which day case, scheduled procedures, surgeries, scans and outpatient services can be better arranged to ensure greater capacity in the future and help to address waiting lists.
The development of additional capacity will be provided through dedicated, standalone Elective Hospitals in Cork, Galway and Dublin. These hospitals will focus on high volume, low complexity procedures, and a range of related diagnostic services, initially on a day-case only basis. Day procedures offered in the first phase will include Gastrointestinal, Gynaecology, Opthalmology, and Orthopaedics.
The elective hospitals will provide coverage for 60-70% of the overall population, catering for up to 940,000 procedures annually (approx. 215,000 Day Case surgery & Minor Operation procedures, approx. 115,000 Endoscopy procedures, over 400,000 outpatient diagnostics and treatments, and almost 200,000 outpatient consultations) across the three centres, including capacity for approximately 180,000 procedures in Cork.
The “Elective Hospitals Oversight Group”, under the joint governance of the Health Service Executive, Department of Health and Sláintecare, is guiding the development of the elective hospital proposals, following the process outlined in the updated Public Spending Code, setting out the value for money requirements for the evaluation, planning, and management of large public investment projects.
Individual Preliminary Business Cases for each location are at an advanced stage of development in line with the Public Spending Code for proposals costing more than €100m and are expected to be submitted to the Department of Health in early 2022. However, as the deliberative process remains ongoing and, pending review by the Departments of Health and Public Expenditure and Reform and Government approval-in-principle to proceed to the next stage of the Spending Code, is it not possible at this point to provide a provisional budget for construction and delivery.
