Ten Thousand Births a Year

The new National Maternity Hospital is going ahead. The Government approved it on Tuesday.

Building starts early next year at Elm Park, on the St Vincent's campus, and it should be finished in 2033.

That's good news. Say it plainly.

Holles Street does heroic work in an old building. More than 7,000 babies were born there last year, and more than 1,300 were cared for in its neonatal intensive care unit.

The new hospital will have 244 single rooms, 24 birthing rooms and five theatres, planned for 10,000 births a year.

Ten thousand first cries, every year, in one building.

The master, Prof Jennifer Walsh, said mothers will get "the privacy, space and dignity they expect and deserve."

Good. They've waited a long time.

Now the harder part.

In 2013 the hospital was costed at around €150 million. The approved budget is now €1.86 billion, more than ten times as much. Families are entitled to ask why, and to expect that this time the date holds.

And a building is not the same as care.

The same week, a Cork mother stood outside the Four Courts after her baby son George died two days after birth. She had asked whether she should be worried, and was reassured.

Single rooms won't fix that on their own. Listening will.

So here's what we'd like to see go up alongside the concrete: enough midwives, enough scans, and enough time for a mother's question to be taken seriously. And every baby, at every stage, treated as the patient they already are.

When we picture this hospital, who do we see? A mother, yes. But also the smallest patient in the building, in the incubator, who can't ask for anything.

Build it. Build it well. Then fill it with people who have time to listen, to the mother and to the child.

Sources: The Irish Times on the new hospital (20 Oct), the Department of Health announcement.