Plans to build a new national children's hospital on the grounds of the Mater hospital in Dublin have given rise to objections from competing interests and some professional paediatric staff. There have been allegations of political interference by the Taoiseach and of a lack of transparency in the decision-making process.
The controversy has intensified in advance of the general election and a development aimed at providing the optimum treatment facilities for sick children is in danger of descending into farce.
Proponents of the Mater site attribute the blame for these events to vested interests opposed to change that would negatively affect them and their own institutions. Conversely, those who are against the selection of the Mater as the best location for the development see it as too limited in scale and accessibility to offer sick children and their parents the excellence in care and treatment outcome to which they are entitled.
Health Service Executive chief executive Professor Brendan Drumm, himself a paediatrician, has made an impassioned plea for an end to professional and administrative in-fighting. He urged all those involved to put the interests of sick children first. He and his colleagues from Crumlin children's hospital, he recalled, had been urging the establishment of a state-of-the-art treatment centre for years and its construction at the Mater site should not now be jeopardised. Professor Drumm is adamant there was no political interference in the work of the task force that made the recommendation. And he insists that the Mater site was the most appropriate one.
It is a long way from the unanimity that existed between the various hospitals and medical professionals before the Government announced its decision last year. The various bodies had accepted the findings of a report, Children's Health First, that highly specialised paediatric services should be located on a single site, alongside a teaching hospital and that space should be available for future expansion and for the development of research and education facilities. Access by public and private transport was to be a major consideration.
There are unfortunate echoes here of past initiatives within the health service where universal acknowledgment of the need for change in the general has become bogged down in political skirmishing and medical in-fighting once it moved into the particular.
Sick people deserve the best and their needs should drive the health services, not those of administrators or medical providers. A review of the task force decision in favour of the Mater has been demanded. Should it happen, the exercise must be severely time-limited and predicated on the reality, in the light of recent events, that unanimity will be impossible. The number of children requiring medical treatment is expected to rise by one-quarter over the next 20 years. Existing facilities are outdated and quite inadequate. At this time, the needs of young patients are all that matter.