The board of Tallaght hospital in Dublin will meet next Saturday to decide on whether to allow a co-located private hospital be built on its lands.
The decision to hold the special meeting was made yesterday when an executive committee of the board met to discuss a number of priority issues for the hospital including co-location.
The Irish Times reported yesterday that the Health Service Executive (HSE) had told the hospital to make up its mind on the issue within seven days or it could lose the project and have to pay some of the costs associated with the project.
Minutes of a hospital management team meeting in the past week detailed the HSE threat and noted: "Correspondence from the HSE was noted and will be brought to the attention of the board. The HSE has advised the hospital that it has seven days to indicate its commitment to the project otherwise the HSE reserves the right to exclude AMNCH [Adelaide and Meath and National Children's Hospital] from the process forthwith and to recover associated bid costs incurred by the HSE to date for the site."
Tallaght hospital is one of eight public hospitals on which the HSE wants private co-located hospitals built in order to implement a Government plan to free up 1,000 public hospital beds. The private patients who normally occupy these beds would, under the plan, transfer to the new private hospitals on site.
Tenders have been sought by the HSE from developers willing to build private hospitals on seven other public hospital sites. These include Waterford Regional Hospital, Sligo General Hospital, Limerick Regional Hospital, Cork University Hospital and St James's, Beaumont and Connolly hospitals in Dublin.
The result of the evaluation of tenders submitted in respect of six of the sites will be known shortly.
The co-location plan has been criticised publicly by Dr Fergus O'Ferrall, a board member of Tallaght hospital, who claimed it would entrench the existing two-tier system of hospital care.
There are also a number of others on the hospital board known to be against the project but a senior source at the hospital, who did not wish to be named, said yesterday he believed most board members would ultimately support the co-location plan.
The hospital's medical board is understood to be largely supportive of the plan, seeing it as a way of delivering badly needed extra beds.
A spokeswoman for the hospital confirmed that a special board meeting had now been arranged for Saturday to finalise a decision on the co-location project.