Project shelving has grave consequences for Navan Hospital

The admission by the Health Service Executive (HSE) that the new regional hospital for the north-east will not be delivered by 2015 has surprised few. Apart from the aspiration to build it by then, nothing concrete in terms of planning has been carried out in the past couple of years to progress the project. And, as we all know, there was not a 'red cent' in the Government's coffers to pay for it anyway. That this project has been shelved for the foreseeable future is still a major disappointment, nonetheless, as it formed a central plank of the HSE's plans to transform the way healthcare is delivered to patients in the four counties of Meath, Louth, Cavan and Monaghan. As part of that plan, services currently provided in the region's smaller hospitals such as Our Lady's in Navan were to be transferred to the new state-of-the-art facility whenever it was built. The grave concern now, as annunciated by Kells GP Dr Peter Wahlrab last week, is that the HSE is now controversially continuing with its plan to strip services from Our Lady's and Monaghan General Hospital, even though the new hospital is no longer on the agenda, and centralise them in Cavan General Hospital and Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda. In fact, this process has already begun with Monaghan Hospital becoming the first in the region to be downgraded as a result of the HSE reorganisation of acute hospital services. It now operates as a day hospital with most emergency cases being brought to Cavan General Hospital, 50km away. The Louth County Hospital in Dundalk and Our Lady's Hospital in Navan will be next for the removal of services to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. Those campaigners fighting to retain some basic emergency services in local hospitals like Navan are rightly outraged that this downgrading proposal should continue now that the regional hospital project has fallen off the radar. The promise of a major new acute hospital with 750 beds was what had convinced healthcare stakeholders, including the region's GPs, to agree to the HSE's Transformation Programme. They feel aggrieved not only that the new hospital is now gone albeit temporarily, but that services are still going to be removed to two centralised and already overcrowded locations. The implicit understanding at the time this programme was agreed was that services would be retained until the new 'super hospital' was in place. Meath, as the county with by far the largest population of the north-east counties, was the correct choice for the location of the regional hospital, but it now appears as if this county's population - which is considerably in excess of that of Cavan and Monaghan combined - is to be left without critical services as they are moved out of Meath into Drogheda once a new A&E dept at Our Lady of Lourdes is completed later this year. It is time the people of Navan and the wider Meath area who depend on Our Lady's Hospital stood up together and shouted 'No' once and for all. The relative distance of Drogheda to many parts of west and south County Meath will mean emergency ambulance journeys of up to an hour to get there. Drogheda Hospital is already under enormous pressure and waiting times of several hours are not uncommon in its current A&E department. While its new A&E will be an undoubted improvement, according to GPs, there is inadequate staff provision for it, even though it has attendance figures similar to that of Dublin's busy Mater Hospital A&E. From the promise of having a new centre of excellence in the north-east that everyone could take pride in, the worst possible scenario has now emerged for Meath from this debacle. The HSE promised an action plan designed to improve health service safety and standards that gave the five existing north-east hospitals a central role along with primary and community care providers. Health chiefs are now proposing to remove this and send patients to two already overcrowded facilities which struggle to cope with patient numbers. How can this be called progress? It is an utterly retrograde step which will leave many parts of Meath without a proper service and it needs to be opposed by a collective coming together of politicians and health professionals and anyone else who genuinely cares about the consequences for those who require hospital care in this county.