*Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport, Patrick O’Donovan (FG). Photograph: Joe Buckley
OIREACHTAS members in the Mid-West need to move away from ‘four-cross roads politics’ and stop volunteering sites for a new hospital, the region’s only Minister has said.
Last month, Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG) confirmed that all three options of the HIQA review to improve emergency health services in the Mid-West will be introduced.
This has given hope to the possibility of Clare regaining a hospital with an emergency department. Clare County Council have put forward potential sites to HSE for the construction of a new hospital helping the case for the county to be selected rather than Limerick or Tipperary.
Option A is expanding capacity at University Hospital Limerick (UHL), Option B is extending the UHL campus with a new second site in close proximity under a shared governance and resourcing model, Option C is the construction of a new hospital in the Mid-West with a second emergency department.
Health activists and Clare TD, Cathal Crowe (FF) have also suggested that Option B see the addition of a new hospital in South-East Clare.
However, Limerick County TD and Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport, Patrick O’Donovan (FG) said the approach of pitching sites to the HSE is “the last thing” that is required at present.
Minister O’Donovan remarked, “The last thing the HSE or the Department of Health need at the moment and I know the temptation of some politicians is they feel an urge to volunteer sites for their own four cross roads, we’ve had too much four cross roads with regards to politics in this country leading us to the decisions and bad decisions which were taken over successive years.
“One of the fundamental breaks with that was the National Cancer Strategy where small hospitals that didn’t have a throughput of people that didn’t have the experience, certainty or expertise around treating cancer that they lost those services, it was the right thing to do so the last thing that this decision needs is politicians from any county in the Mid-West or any party in the Mid-West, my own included volunteering sites because that won’t add to the health needs of the region,” he said on Live95FM’s Limerick Today.
