Departamentul de Sănătate a cheltuit 47 de milioane de euro pe consultanți pentru Spitalul Național de Maternitate întârziat   

THE DEPARTMENT OF Health has paid out €47 million to consultants on the long-awaited National Maternity Hospital (NMH) proposed for Elm Park in Dublin 4 – with work not yet commenced on the main 224 bed hospital building.
According to new Department of Health figures, a total of €124 million in construction costs, including the €47 million on external consultants, has been spent before construction commences on the main hospital building later this year.
The new maternity hospital will ­relocate facilities from its cramped and outdated building in Holles Street in Dublin city to the St Vincent’s ­Hospital campus in Dublin 4.
The NMH is expected to be complete by 2029 – when the project was first announced in 2013, it came then with an overall cost of €150 million.
The final cost is now expected to be a multiple of that and the main tender process beginning in September 2023 and is programmed to run over a period of around 18 months.
In a response to a written Dáil question by Social Democrats TD Aidan Farrelly on the project, it lists the firms that have shared out in the €47 million paid out to consultants.
Some of the external consultants include well known engineering firms, RPS Consulting Engineers, Punch Consulting Engineers and OVE ARUP and Partners Ireland along with Avison Young Planning.
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Accenture, Pricewaterhousecoopers, O’Connell Mahon Architects and Lynch O’Toole Martin Architects are also listed as the 39 separate consultants to share the €47 million in fees.
The payout to consultants includes experts used by the Department of Health to undertake an External Assurance and Process (EAP) review in line with the requirements of the Public Spending Code – now Infrastructure Guidelines.
In the written Dáil reply to the newly elected Kildare North TD, it states that the budget for the main construction works is subject to the outcome of the tender process, the selection of the most economically advantageous tenderer(s), and the subsequent updating of the final business case for Government approval to proceed.
On the overall €124 million construction costs, which includes the €47 million paid out to consultants, the Dáil reply states that a series of works were initially carried out to de-risk the campus in advance of the construction works for the new hospital and as part of the ongoing investment in the State’s legacy health estate to address the risks on acute hospital campuses.
This included enabling works, decanting, junction upgrades, and prevention works, some of which were specific planning requirements. As part of the St Vincent’s Hospital University Hospital Campus Development Plan a new pharmacy facility and extension to the existing multi-storey carpark were completed in 2021.
In parallel to the ongoing tender and procurement process, in order to construct the proposed NMH development as a single-phase development and de-risk the future site as much as possible, a number of buil