By Gary Culliton.
The West/North West Hospitals Group has pledged to introduce its new Clinical Director Structure and the Group will establish a Group Integration Team to oversee integration of the new hospitals. A re-build has started in 11 key areas and this is expected to be complete by autumn 2014. The observations in a HIQA report will be taken into account in the relevant areas of the re-build programme. Letterkenny General Hospital (LGH) , Donegal, is now part of the West/North West Hospitals Group.
HIQA has carried out an announced monitoring assessment at LGH. This phase of monitoring is a contributory phase towards preparing service providers for the eventual monitoring of services against the National Standards for Safer Better Healthcare. The areas assessed at Letterkenny were: Surgical 1 (medical ward: Respiratory Medicine, Cardiology and General Medicine) Maternity ward and Surgical 2 (mixed surgical specialties). Since the visit took place, two significant events occurred, both of which have had an impact on the implementation of the recommendations of the report.
On July 26, after 57mm of rainfall in 15 minutes, floods wiped out 40 per cent of the floor space of LGH, eliminating more than 70 per cent of the Hospital’s capacity.
gary.culliton@imt.ie