Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has announced a plan to integrate CHI, which oversees the three children\u2019s hospitals, which will be made part of the HSE although it will take a number of years.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we move towards the opening of the National Children\u2019s Hospital Ireland, we need to plan for integrated paediatric healthcare and the policy direction for Children\u2019s Health Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe National Children\u2019s Hospital Ireland will be the central hub in the network of paediatric care with links to regional paediatric units, operated overwhelmingly by the HSE. Accordingly, I have decided to integrate CHI into the HSE structure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe background of CHI was the integration of three very different paediatric hospitals with a view to moving to a single dedicated specialist paediatric hospital.<\/p>\n
“We are very close to that hospital being delivered and operational and it is therefore time to further integrate paediatric care formally into the HSE.\u201d<\/p>\n
CHI has been at the centre of controversies in recent years over the care of children undergoing spinal surgeries, waiting lists for scoliosis patients and misuse of funding from the National Treatment Purchase Fund.<\/p>\n
The minister has also appointed Dr Yvonne Traynor as chairperson of the CHI board.<\/p>\n
She has added Fergus Finlay and Suzanne Garvey to the board.<\/p>\n
Responding to today\u2019s announcement, co-lead of children\u2019s advocacy groups Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus Paediatric Advocacy, Amanda Coughlan, said today that \u201cin April, after the damning Hiqa report into children\u2019s spinal surgeries the Taoiseach Micheal Martin stood on the floor of the Dail and said he backed the CHI board.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust five months on, the whole organisation is being subsumed into the HSE a complete u-turn by the Government.<\/p>\n
“What has been discovered that led to this decision? There needs to be transparency.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we met with the Minister for Health in May and outlined the absolute failures of care in scoliosis and spina bifida children care, we had asked for this to occur and were told it was not an option being explored, \u201c she added calling for full transparency around the decision.<\/p>\n
The Irish Independent has contacted the Department of Health for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has announced a plan to integrate CHI, which oversees the three children\u2019s hospitals,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,898,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-40397","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-latest-news-ticker","11":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}