Pressure on accident and emergency units in the eastern region could be alleviated somewhat in 18 months when a new private hospital in west Dublin opens with its own emergency treatment room.
Work on the 125-bed hospital near Lucan started this week.
While its emergency section will not take ambulances or deal with major accidents, it will deal with many of the other cases which would normally turn up in A&E departments.
Its backers say it hopes to treat public patients sent to it under contract by the Department of Health, in addition to private patients.
It will cater for a wide range of conditions, including heart patients needing stents and cancer patients needing radiotherapy treatment. Current radiotherapy facilities cannot meet the demand for treatment.
The €110 million development will be called the Hermitage Medical Clinic. It is being set up by two medical consultants, Mr James Sheehan and Dr George Duffy, founders of both the Blackrock Clinic and the Galway Clinic, and Mr Sean Mulryan, managing director of the international property group, Ballymore, which owns the land at Fonthill in the Liffey Valley where the new hospital is being built.
Given its proximity to the M50 and the N4, Mr Sheehan, an orthopaedic surgeon, says he expects many patients from the midlands as well as Dublin to use the hospital. It hopes to treat at least 15,000 patients a year.
"Bearing in mind that 70 per cent of people in general hospitals come through A&E, there is a huge need for extra services to deal with emergencies other than major road traffic accidents," he said.
He added that there was "a desperate shortage" of hospital beds in the State, evident from the numbers of patients who had to be accommodated on trolleys in A&E every day. Yesterday the number on trolleys, according to the Irish Nurses Organisation, was 246.
In December the promoters of another private hospital, the Beacon being built in Sandyford in south Dublin, said it too would provide emergency care. The Beacon Hospital, with 180 beds, is due to open next year.
Mr Sheehan said that while there was a lot of talk about private hospitals being built, the Galway Clinic when it opened in 2003 was the first private hospital to be built in the State in 20 years.
Mr Sheehan said he would like to see substantial numbers of public patients being treated at the new Hermitage clinic. But he said while 50 per cent of the facilities at the Galway Clinic were made available for public patients to be treated under the State's National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), few patients had been referred by the fund to it to date.
"We only treated 50 in-patients in the public side in the first six months and 200 day-surgery cases due to lack of referrals.
"We could have done 10 times that amount of work. It's a huge disappointment," he said.
It did not make sense, he said, that the NTPF was sending patients abroad to be treated when they could be treated at home. He said people waiting more than three months for treatment should be contacting the NTPF to arrange treatment for them. They did not seem to be doing so, he added.
Public patients waiting longer than three months on a waiting list for treatment are entitled to contact the NTPF which will then arrange treatment privately for them.
Apart from the high technology hospital, which will have five theatres and extensive diagnostic facilities, the Hermitage development will also house a four-storey consultants' clinic with 39 individual suites.
The second phase of the development, for which planning permission has not yet been sought, will include in-patient accommodation for 60 patients, a step-down care building with between 70 and 80 spaces as well as a gymnasium, physiotherapy and other ancillary amenities. There are also plans to provide on-site living accommodation for up to 100 staff.
Mr Mulryan is expected to retain his one-third stake in the Hermitage clinic but Mr Sheehan is likely to be sharing his interest with the beef tycoon Mr Larry Goodman who holds 40 per cent of the equity in the Galway Clinic. Dr Duffy, a consultant in nuclear medicine, is apparently dividing his one-third stake with the Dublin property developer Mr John Flynn.
Part of the funding for the hospital will come from the sale of the 39 consultant suites to suitably qualified specialists. Selling prices have not yet been fixed, but they are unlikely to be available at less than €1 million each.
The 101-bed Galway Clinic, which opened in June 2003, was over-subscribed for the consultant suites and the hospital now has 77 consultants working out of the 36 available units. One-third of the medical practitioners have no involvement in the public health system, according to the clinic.