By Irishexaminer.com,Liz Dunphy

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Commissioning the hospital — kitting out the premises and transforming it into a fully functional, patient-ready hospital — is expected to take some months before patients can be admitted.

Mr Gloster said “ultimately what we call the substantial completion date for the building does rest with BAM”.

“It’s not an issue of money. It’s not an issue of resources on our part. It is an issue of them giving us a compliant programme of work and sticking to that compliant programme.”

The hospital had an initial completion date of August 2022. As recently as this August, health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill raised concerns that BAM was not bringing enough workers onto the site, despite the State making enough money available to do so.

While there were 800-900 workers on site every week at the end of 2024, that had dropped to around 400-500 in late August, she said.

CHI to be integrated into HSE

Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), which had been due to operate the new National Children’s Hospital at St James’ Hospital campus in South Dublin, is now to be integrated into the HSE by 2027, with both the HSE and CHI managing the new hospital in the meantime, Mr Gloster said.

CHI has been mired in controversy over unacceptable waiting lists for children’s orthopaedic surgery and the use of unapproved implantable springs in spinal surgery at Temple Street Children’s Hospital.

Mr Gloster denied that recent scandals over orthopaedic surgeries at CHI including hip surgeries and spinal surgeries, were the cause of the body’s planned integration into the HSE.

“I can understand some commentators might form that view,” he said.

However, the increasingly integrated nature of paediatric care, especially once the new hospital is operational, was a major factor in the decision to integrate CHI into the HSE, Mr Gloster said.

“The new National Children’s Hospital […] needs to connect in a very full and integrated way with paediatric units across the country.

“So that is one of the key driving forces. A system like that can be far better integrated and supported by being a direct part of the overall healthcare system which in Ireland is the HSE.”

But there was “no issue” accepting that challenges and “trust issues” have emerged over CHI in recent months, he said.

Trust is a very hard thing to rebuild when it is broken and when it’s fractured.

“There have been things in CHI which were absolutely wholly unacceptable.

“There have been communication failings between CHI and parents which quite frankly you couldn’t but be embarrassed by.

“There have been lots of other challenges but they are all acknowledged, they’re out there, they are being dealt with, they will continue to be dealt with,” Mr Gloster said.

“And in the fullness of time, I believe that the trust that’s required in the very sensitive area of spinal surgery for children will be rebuilt.”

‘Rebuilding trust’

He said he has “a number of processes underway” which are fundamentally aimed at rebuilding that trust, and efforts are also already underway to change any poor communication and lack of transparency in CHI, problems repeatedly raised by parents.

CHI was “not waiting for the HSE or the full migration into the HSE for improvement to start to happen,” he said.

And, despite CHI’s challenges, it was “really important to remember [….] there are literally thousands of children who are patients of CHI in oncology, in cardiology, in neurology, in general medicine, they get an excellent service, a really high standard of service, very often ranked in the category of world class,” Mr Gloster said.

Mr Gloster is leaving his role in March. The HSE’s CEO is paid €398,174 to run the health service, which has a budget of €26.9bn this year. The HSE is Ireland’s largest employer with more than 148,000 full-time equivalent staff.