Phoenix: A Medical School for University Hospital Waterford?

What have we learned from the funding of our airport? In general, we were simply played by government and the Dept. of Transport. There was never any real willingness to fund our airport and despite the protestation of ministers Butler and Cummins and the inclusion of the project in the Project for Government, we never had the political power to push it over the line. 

All the talk about business plans and procurement process was simply a means to an end, to squeeze the life out of the project by kicking it down the road until investors get tired of waiting. 

Minister Butler said that the “Dept. believed we should have no more airports” as if that was a sufficient reason to accept a refusal for anything. 

Minister Cummins went on about price increases and procurement plans until people’s eyes glazed over. 

By failing to provide matching funding for access infrastructure with real possibilities, government has demonstrated an antipathy to our aspirations. Thus far and no further?

It is ever thus. The (still unfinished) quest for 24/7 cardiology was replete with suggestions that such a facility is not needed here or that expansion of existing centres (Cork) was the solution. 

Progress is only made through dogged persistence and public protest. Anyone paying attention to national health politics will have seen the comments from Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill that the major voluntary hospitals in Dublin (St Vincent’s, St James, Mater etc), which are funded by the state through the HSE but administered by very independent boards, must be brought under HSE funding management. 

Remember the chairman of St Vincent’s in 2014. “We are swinging around to compliance with pay rules”? It's amazing how existing providers in medicine and education jealously guard the status quo.

In chatting about our airport, the subject of a full university and a UHW medical school emerged. Why is the latter deemed to be yet another “something” that we should not aspire to while the existing providers are expanding? 

It is not part of any strategic aspiration or request by SETU, indeed one gets the impression that it is almost something not to be talked of or raised in polite company. 

20-odd years ago Maynooth College was slightly smaller than WIT. Along came instant university status, courtesy of Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy, and an almost unstoppable succession of new buildings, course and student number expansion. 

There is no major hospital in Maynooth, yet it opened a new school of nursing last July, showing again the ability of universities operating under traditional legislation to act swiftly. 

Simultaneously, while new nursing courses were being allocated to colleges around the country, SETU received the lowest number. SETU has been allocated new Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy schools but physical development of new buidings is a long way away. 

Funding has been provided to develop new facilities to the planning permission stage. Having endured 20 years waiting for a new engineering building on the Cork Road, now under construction, I won’t be holding my breath.

UHW has benefitted from increased staff numbers over the past few years as its status as one of nine national Model 4 hospitals seems to have finally been noticed. Capital investment has begun to arrive, albeit slowly. 

If there was a coherent regional development plan, if all the bits fitted together, UHW would obviously be designated for at least a graduate entry medical school. 

UPMC, which offers radiotherapy at Whitfield, already has two large private hospitals in the region and would surely contribute to a medical school and already operates such schools (Pitt Med) elsewhere. 

UHW as a tertiary hospital has a rapidly growing consultant body with all the necessary specialties and necessary facilities, and already teaches a quota of young UCC medical students. There is a very large Royal College of Surgeons education facility on site and there was a hope some years ago that the RCSI would greatly expand it to form a nascent medical school, but instead they concentrated on their Dublin facility, which has gained independent university status. 

We constantly hear it said that staff recruitment to UHW can be slow despite its excellent (and growing) reputation. It is quite obvious that a medical school would add enormously to the attraction of the hospital. 

The benefit for students in the southeast who wished to follow a medical career would be huge and would also create, over time, a body of medical expertise nationally and internationally who would be interested, as they are in Cork, Dublin and Galway, for example, in returning to their own city or region. The benefits for smaller model 3 hospitals in Clonmel, Kilkenny and Wexford in using a hub and spoke medical training scheme with UHW would be very worthwhile, and contribute greatly to the attraction of the south east region for foreign direct investment.

It should be remembered that the population of this country has almost doubled in the past 50 years. This is not the country of scarcity of the mid-20th century. When the government spends vast sums on new facilities at SETU and UHW, however slowly, then surely there should be a plan to maximise on that investment? 

Unfortunately, everything seems to be compromised by politics, medical and educational. Government promises that SETU would have a professorial structure and independent capacity to borrow for development, as Maynooth and all legacy universities are constantly doing, have gone unfulfilled. 

There is growing dissent across the Tech Uni sector that its creation from a series of merged and disparate entities was quite unplanned and little more than a cost-saving measure. There is growing unhappiness from students in the Tech Uni sector that government has not delivered on its promises.

Waterford has sought university status since the mid-1930s. SETU, in its present manifestation, is an incomplete entity, despite promises of game-changing scale and investment. 

Pharmacy and Vet medicine are welcome additions, but a graduate medical school, as a start, would be the real statement of intent that would copper-fasten and unite many strands of government regional and educational policy. All the pieces of the puzzle necessary for a medical school already exist in Waterford. If the will was there!