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20 January 2011
PRIME TIME
By Mary Murphy
KILLARNEY is set to lead the way in medical innovation with the official opening next week of a new primary care centre at the state-of-the-art Reeks Gateway development.
The new 50,000 sq ft, €25 million centre will put Killarney at the fore-front of a new health care revolution and the project will create an additional 100 jobs in the town.
Upwards of 25,000 patients in the greater Killarney area will see their GP services transfer to the new centre with the first general practitioners making the move next Monday.
A full contingent of 16 family doctors will be based at the centre by February 14.
The aim of primary medical centres, in keeping with acknowledged best practice, is to place patients at the centre of care and according to Killarney GP and centre director, Dr Gary Stack, it will completely revolutionise the way treatment is provided in the town. "Health care should follow the patient, not the patient following health care. All the GPs will still have their own individual practices so patients will lose nothing but they will gain a lot," he said.
"Individually we may not have been in a position to offer all the services that we would have liked to in the past but by combining our resources and those of the HSE, we can now offer services that just haven’t been available up to now. This will be a one-stop shop for medical care," Dr Stack added.
The centre had originally been due to be built on a private site adjacent to St Finan’s Hospital in Killarney but the plan ran into planning difficulties.
"There was a lot of disappointment over that. The GPs in Killarney put a huge financial input into the St Finan’s project but planning put an end to that," Dr Stack added.
"We started looking at The Reeks as an option 12 to 18-months-ago. It is in a very central location and the building is roughly the same size as the one we had planned," he confirmed.
There will be roughly 25,000 GP patients transferring to the new base and once the other activities come online, the HSE will provide services to patients across South Kerry.
An on-site pharmacy, under chief pharmacist Donal O’Sullivan, will also open on January 24 along with a range of other services.
The group behind the centre is in the process of talking to consultants from Tralee and Cork to allow them to provide services from the complex while discussions are taking place with the HSE with a view to locating its new primary health service on the campus.
Discussions are also taking place to allow outpatient clinics to be held in Killarney to avoid patients having to travel to Tralee, Cork or Limerick.
Phase two of the development in 2012 will see x-ray and ultra sound facilities as well as endoscopy and outpatient cardiac procedures provided at the Reeks Gateway complex.
UL will also be locating a medical school in the facility, basing young doctors on site.
Dr Sean Maguire, medical director of Prime Healthcare, remarked: "The idea is to have all the health care professionals caring for a patient located in one building. For example a person who has experienced a stroke may need the input of his GP, a physiotherapist, speech and language therapies, occupational therapies and medications from a pharmacist. Now that will all be available together," he added.
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