Pádraig O'Sullivan
Question:188. Deputy Pádraig O'Sullivan asked the Minister for Health the cost of 500 additional regional inpatient rehabilitation beds; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [40447/24]
View answerWednesday, 9 October 2024
Questions (188)
Written answers
Rehabilitation sits at the interface of a range of necessary services, from acute care to ongoing community care and disability services. With established expertise in multidisciplinary care planning and delivery, rehabilitation services have the potential to play a key role in better coordinating the patient journey across these streams of care and ensuring that each patient receives the right services at the right time.
A large number of factors have a bearing on the estimated new build capital cost of acute, non-acute, or community in-patient beds. These include considerations as to whether the project is entirely a new construction build or includes some element of refurbishment; the extent of enabling, decant and site preparation works; extent of IPC measures; scope of development and economies of scale; site specific considerations including planning conditions; and the scope of related ancillary upgrade of refurbishment works necessary to the successful operation of the beds provided.
In the context of the above, current external factors such as inflation rates, supply chain issues & availability of resources can influence the capital costs of projects. As rehabilitation beds are catering for people with specific complex needs the cost may vary.
For indicative purposes, a capital cost range of €0.60m to €0.70m per non-acute bed could be estimated. This does not consider on-going current costs including staffing and other operational costs.
It should be noted that this high-level budgetary cost range per bed relates to the in-patient/ward accommodation and does not account for key clinical departments such as radiology, operating departments, neurology etc; which are project specific and sit outside of this cost range.