Questions are starting to be raised over the expectation for Ireland’s newest state-of-the-art children’s hospital to open in 2025
The project, which has been met with major delays due to the pandemic and budget issues, is now earmarked for a 2025 launch.
It was due to be completed in 2020, but was pushed back to 2022 due to Covid-19, only to be delayed until 2024 and now summer of 2025 is the latest promise.
However, DCU Procurement Lecturer, Paul Davis, spoke to Newstalk this morning and said he is doubtful that the project will actually be complete any time soon.
“We’re supposed to have a commissioning plan. The commissioning plan was supposed to be a six-month commissioning plan.
“So far, that commissioning plan has been based around a substantial completion date and that phrase ‘substantial completion date’ has been used for about 18 months.
“We’ve finally been given one – supposedly June or July this year; our expectation is that it won’t be.
“So, in other words, we’re going to miss that again because we’ve already missed it completely.”
Mr. Davis went on to say that he hopes he will be proved wrong in this case but that six months is a very short window to kit out such a large clinical environment.
“You’re now taking three separate hospital groupings, three sets of staff, you are going to have to migrate those staff over to one new building.
“I don’t see a recruitment plan in place; they say they have a commissioning plan in place but they estimate they’ve got 38,000 pieces of equipment to commission.
“This hasn’t started because we’re still waiting for a completion date. If it has started, where has it started? What are they doing? What’s the reporting on it?
“Until January this year, we didn’t even have a CEO in place.”
The original agreed upon cost of the National Children’s Hospital was around €980 million in 2017. Now, due to a number of issues, the final price is looking to be above €2 billion.
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