Health systems can often be victims of a certain degree of inertia, bogged down by bureaucracy and their inherent complexity. But Bon Secours didn’t become the largest independent hospital group in the country by resting on its laurels. As group chief executive officer Bill Maher explains, it is committed to progress and innovation, and focused on reinvesting in staff, infrastructure, facilities and innovative practices to ensure exceptional patient care.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the new state-of-the-art hospital the group will open in Limerick later this year. Scarcely 30 months since then taoiseach Leo Varadkar performed the sod-turning ceremony, Ireland’s newest private hospital will begin accepting patients in September 2025.
The plan is to recruit an additional 300 staff for the hospital, in addition to the almost 300 being redeployed from the older Barringtons Hospital. Despite the widespread challenges in healthcare recruitment, Maher says the level of interest is extremely high. “We’ve had great interest since our recruitment campaign has commenced, with more roles to be advertised in the coming months,” he notes.
The new hospital will significantly increase the capacity of Bon Secours to provide care in the Limerick area, offering a broad range of surgical procedures, including a catheterisation lab, and a 10-bay hospital access unit. It will be complemented by a 10,000 sq ft clinical services hub, housing consultant suites, outpatient radiology and diagnostics, set to open in advance of the new hospital. The need is there and this represents the big motivation for taking on such an ambitious project, Maher says.
“There’s only one reason we’re doing that, which is the demand for services is relentless at the moment,” he asserts. “And I don’t just mean in Limerick, but across the country. The new hospital will be a great asset to all the people of Limerick, both public and private patients.”
The new hospital is the result of a €300 million capital investment that underpinned the hospital group’s 2025 strategic plan and saw big developments made across the entire health system. This five-year strategic vision incorporated five goals and 15 initiatives, and the group has recently received the results of an implementation review carried out by consultants at EY. Maher will be sharing the group’s progress against the plan at this year’s Future Health Summit, as it begins to prepare for its 2030 strategic plan.
“Our 2025 plan was to develop our facilities, and develop our staff,” Maher explains, “making sure we have exceptional people delivering exceptional care while growing our business.” And revenue has increased significantly – Maher notes that it has more than doubled since 2018.
The review benchmarked the health system against other private hospitals and other similar organisations in Europe, with favourable results, and also highlighted the group’s efficiencies in terms of how it uses its facilities and its success in introducing processes that ensure operational excellence.
According to the group’s chief strategy officer Lynn Guthrie, the external review was particularly illuminating, as it highlighted aspects of the group’s activities that may be taken for granted by those working within it.
“Bon Secours as an organisation is not for profit and very much values driven,” she says. “That’s what stood out for EY when they were looking at things like our exceptional care and exceptional people. Our unique selling point is that focus on how our values are lived, how we drive that through in terms of our mission leaders, would be quite different in the private sector in Ireland, and that all came through in the review.”
A crucial element of the 2025 strategic plan will be the introduction of BonsConnect, the group’s new electronic health record (EHR) system. While there have been deafening calls for the introduction of an EHR in the public system, the reality is that this is much easier said than done. BonsConnect is planned to go live across the hospital group in phases beginning later this year.
Guthrie notes the significant challenges involved in bringing this to fruition. “Firstly, there’s a considerable investment, and it’s not necessarily an easy business case from a return on investment point of view,” she explains. “But also, when we’ve got five hospitals, we’ve had five types of every imaginable legacy system. So, we’ve had to do a huge amount of work in each hospital in terms of mapping the future and getting consensus around every aspect of the patient journey throughout the hospital, within every service.”
Guthrie says extensive staff engagement has ensured widespread buy-in for the new technology. “People are certainly very excited about it, and they’ve bought into the vision of a digital future,” she says. “Their mindsets are shifting around moving from paper and doing things manually to electronically – that’s a big change.”
Naturally, with precious patient data at stake, cybersecurity is a big priority throughout the project. BonsConnect will be the first cloud-hosted solution in Europe, working with its technology partner Meditech. “There has been a huge focus around building security and compliance by design, to make sure that our information and our patients’ data is secure,” Guthrie explains. “It’s really complicated and complex, and that’s what makes projects like this so challenging.”
The blood, sweat and tears will be worth it, however, for the positive impact on the patient experience and their eventual outcomes. The new EHR will ensure unprecedented continuity of care across disciplines and between all Bon Secours hospitals, enhancing the point-of-care and bedside patient experience. Patients will also have access to their own medical records electronically in the next phase of the project, aiding in shared decision-making, Maher says. “It’s about harnessing the capability of new technology to improve patient experience and care.”
