The state of the Ireland’s maternity services is deeply unsatisfactory. In August of last year, in considerable frustration and anger at the lack of any cohesive action to make improvements, I wrote to the Irish Times (letter) to describe the situation. By budget time, it was already known that several large maternity hospitals had had [...]

The simplistic idea behind co-location - to create extra space for public patients in public hospitals by transferring the care of private patients currently occupying beds in those hospital to new private hospitals on the same campus, with the private sector encouraged to pay for these new hospitals through tax-based incentives - is deeply flawed. [...]