National Children's Hospital

Purple said:
What sort of half-assed design planning process did they go through?
Were there no consultants or doctors involved at the planning stage?
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Exactly. Unless the scope of the hospital has changed significantly, either the original design was fundamentally flawed, or these last minute design changes are non essential and should be de-scoped.
 
Purple said:
What sort of half-assed design planning process did they go through?
Were there no consultants or doctors involved at the planning stage?
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Stuff like that seems common enough within HSE led projects, a lot of the times those defining the design don't understand the requirements of the specialist facilities, and those who do understand only get to see the details at a very late stage.
 
Leo said:
Stuff like that seems common enough within HSE led projects, a lot of the times those defining the design don't understand the requirements of the specialist facilities, and those who do understand only get to see the details at a very late stage.
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I know we all like to blame the politicians but within the 900 or so people in the department of health and the 110,000 people employed by the HSE I would hope that they could find a handful who could do the sort of project management needed for this... or know someone who could.
 
it is incumbent on the Department of Public Expenditure to explain its involvement. The department is involved in the tendering and procurement process to ensure cost certainty at the tender award stage, value for money and efficient delivery of public works projects. The department would have had to approve the additional €320 million cost escalation

Michael Harty TD,
chairman of the Joint Oireachtas Health Committee

Where’s Boxer or even Paschal ?
 
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BAM have just offered the Govt a 'get out of jail' card

https://www.rte.ie/news/health/2019/0215/1030824-childrens-hospital/
If the Govt accepts this offer, it will lose a lot of face and basically admit it's screwed up the project. Also, the whole debate over location of the hospital will become centre stage again.

If it ploughs ahead after declining the offer, any further mess-ups will be career ending for some senior politicians.

Decisions, decisions
 
The source of this information is a political party and I want to de-politicise the numbers and try to get some perspective on the debacle. It is floating around social media but for once I'm not attributing it. Can anyone verify or rubbish the numbers with decent sources? The last number comes to us from Leo Simon & Simon, Consultant Incompetents, Merrion Square, Dublin 2.

Alder Hey Children's Hospital, London, England - Completed 2015 - Total Cost €213M, 309 beds, Cost/bed €690k

Hospital de Lisboa Oriental, Lisbon, Portugal - PPP Due for Completion 2023 - Total Projected Cost €330M, 875 beds, Cost/Bed €377k

National Children's' Hospital, Dubin, Ireland - Due to Start ????? - Total Projected Cost €1.7bn, 470 beds, Cost/Bed €3.61M.

My solution to this monster that threatens to devour us all is to stop the construction, fire everyone involved, hire the teams that did Alder Hay, Save €3 million per bed!!!
 
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I have since spoken to someone who has visited Alder Hey and who states the costs he saw were UK£300M, about €339 at current fex rates, giving a cost per bed of €1.1M for London. Another way of looking at the numbers is to add the cost of Alder Hey and Hospital de Lisboa Oriental (still WIP remember) together, to get a kind of European average cost/bed for a childrens hospital.

Total Costs = €669M for 779 beds or €859k/bed.

Why would Leo, Simon & Simon, their various boards and project teams, contractors and bean-counters think that 4.2 times that figure is worth completing? Stop it now!
 
Costs and wages are much lower in Portugal. It isn't a reasonable comparison. London is.
 
mathepac said:
Hospital de Lisboa Oriental, Lisbon, Portugal - PPP Due for Completion 2023 - Total Projected Cost €330M, 875 beds, Cost/Bed €377k
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From a report on Newstalk last week, the State will also pay the builders 17m a year for 27 years on top of that 330m.
So €780m in total.
 
There will be a vote of no confidence in the Minister for Health.
I've no problem with that as long as it doesn't stop there.
The problem is that it will stop there; the opposition will have their scalp and another thing to beat the government with at the next election and things will get back to normal without any of those really to blame ever facing any consequences. We won't even know their names! They will scuttle off with their pay and pensions intact to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, insulated in the cocoon of unaccountable, unsanctionable, willful incompetence.
 
None of this is the ministers fault, his responsibility perhaps, but it is the fault of the civil service.
 
Lets not pretend that this couldn't or doesn't happen in the private sector. It can and it does and people very rarely lose their jobs when they screw up. The thing is that they might lose their jobs or their company might go bust. That will never happen in the public sector. That's the difference.
 
cremeegg said:
None of this is the ministers fault, his responsibility perhaps, but it is the fault of the civil service.
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That is the way we do things, a direct copy of the way the Brits do. Politicians are the sacrificial lambs, dispoable, while the ship of permanent government sails on, regardless of the rotten, wood-worm infested, figure head hanging from the bow-sprit.

Pascal has to go too, as do his minions, D'Arcy, O'Donovan & The Boxer. If two of his senior ministers and their gofors go then Leo has to go too. Where is the Yank in all of this? As Children's Minister is there not some corner of this fiasco that's hers or is the reality that she is the only full-blown Minister with responsibility for a single State agency?

Which is all well and good but what about the worker-bees rather than the queens, those paid for directly for over over-seeing the project and getting well paid for it? I say clean them all out and start again by designing the organisation to oversee this project. The current complex system is demonstrably not fit for (any) purpose. See my earlier post.
 
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Delboy said:
From a report on Newstalk last week, the State will also pay the builders 17m a year for 27 years on top of that 330m.
So €780m in total.
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30 year PPP project from inception - 3-year construction plan, 27-year operating plan.

€300 construction costs, privately funded, and 27 x €16M/annum funding by State = €732M for 875 beds *and* 2,945 parking spaces comes in at €837k/bed or using your figures, €891k/bed, either figure mere fractions of the €3.61M/bed we seem to be expected to pay. This level of difference cannot be explained by the difference in wages for a brickie in Lisbon versus one in Dublin.
 
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Ministers come and go - the civil service run most departments. Ministers set the policy the officials administer it. I can't believe that some people are calling for the hospital to be stopped and moved to a green field site - a waste of more money. Wait for the report and see if heads will roll, it needs to happen. Looking at the performances in the Dail today would not inspire confidence in any of the politicans to do any better. At least FF seem to put the country ahead of party politics on this occasion.
 
Stop all work now. Noone has any idea how much this project will cost or even indeed what this project's deliverables will be. We have medics being asked for input NOW and their input is changing the design and the planned deliverables. Stop it now while we still have a chance otherwise it will be PPARS II, 2,367% of its inital budget spent and nothing delivered before they stopped it.
 
We seem to have a "new" problem with the NCH. It seems no-one is interested in working in the place if and when it gets completed. I say completed but I'm not sure what that means as the original set of deliverables is being reduced as we speak. It seems they'll be short several hundred of the specialists required to keep a large facility running over several shifts through holidays etc.

I say "new" problem as this should have been the first question the various project teams asked themselves; how many staff can we attract to work in Dublin, given the housing, cost of living,transport and parking problems there'll be in a city-centre brown-field site? The number of staff define the size and complexity of the facility and that drives design and therefore cost.

Anyone care to predict how much of the new NCH will lie empty and decaying after it is officially "finished"?
 
mathepac said:
That is the way we do things, a direct copy of the way the Brits do.
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The problem is we don't copy what the UK does. The UK carries out major infrastructural projects by Public Private Partnerships https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/public-private-partnerships and previously by Private Finance Initiatives. We don't do this, or haven't done it successfully, i.e. the way the UK does it. There is a ubiquitous 'not invented here' syndrome in the Irish public sector, whereby foreign success is not ported to Ireland.
 
Or is it more of the same chase for 'disturbance money' that typically accompanies any move to new facilities? Like when the NCH moved to Tallaght.
 
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