Update: National Children's Hospital Cost – Health 30th September, 2014

QUESTION NO:  454

 
  *  To ask the Minister for Health the extent to which the costs associated with previous preparations for the National Children’s Hospital will be offset and utilised as part of the preliminaries in respect of the currently proposed; and if he will make a statement on the matter.

                                                                                          – Bernard J. Durkan T.D.

 
REPLY.
The National Paediatric Hospital Development Board was established in 2007 as the body with statutory responsibility for the planning, design, building and equipping of the new children’s hospital. As shown in the Board’s financial statements for 2012, an amount of €39.98m in respect of construction work-in-progress is included in the balance sheet, relating to expenditure on the project at its previous location at the Mater campus.

Much of the work undertaken for the project on that site is transferable to the project in its new location. This includes in particular development of activity projections and capacity requirements, development of  functional requirements, and decisions on workflow, adjacency planning and logistics. This work has been built on in developing the Project Brief for the hospital on the St James’s campus, which was approved in July 2014. As noted in the accounts, the Board is to complete a process to review expenditure to date in the context of determining the value transferable to the new site.