Archive News
Keeping the Bons Secours at cutting edge of medical care
Date Published: {J}
Plans are in motion to bring a number of war-wounded Libyans to the Bon Secours Hospital to be treated as part of an international humanitarian effort.
If these materialise it will be welcomed by the hospital’s CEO, Gerry Burke, who explains that it would be most definitely within the ethos of the religious order who run the private hospital.
The hospital has just officially opened a €15 million extension which has almost doubled its bed capacity and most certainly improved facilities and the future ability to nurture specialist areas of medicine.
One of those specialist areas just announced by the hospital management is the introduction of a respirator laboratory where sleep studies will be carried out.
Gerry, who is a native Barnaderg, Tuam, beams with pride as he shows off the new extension to the hospital in Renmore which now boasts 100 beds and plenty of room for further expansion should the need arise.
The man who graduated from NUIG with a commerce degree went onto train as a chartered accountant in Dublin, where he remained for 12 years before moving to Galway.
That was in 1989. He returned West with his wife Imelda and their two children as Financial Controller at Galvia Hospital, which was then owned by venture capital funds and consultants involved in the hospital.
But by the late 1990s the doctors decided it was time to move on and sell up and, luckily, they got a buyer in the Bon Secours hospital group, which has private hospitals in Dublin, Tralee and Cork and used to run one in Tuam until it closed a few years ago. These hospitals had been set up by the Bon Secours Order of nuns, while the Galway one was the only one acquired by them.
Gerry said they knew when they bought it that they would have to invest in it and immediately set about refurbishing the existing building and slightly extending the entrance. That extension opened in 2006.
“That was Phase One, though they didn’t know it then,” says Gerry who has just overseen the completion of another refurbishment job which, he hopes, should see them well into the future.
But by the time that first extension opened, the environment had changed for private hospitals in Galway when the Galway Clinic opened. The Bons was no longer the only private hospital in town. It was time to go back to the drawing board.
“We were an established hospital in Galway, so many would have thought ‘how could the two co-exist?’. And University Hospital Galway was being developed as well with new consultants being appointed and with it being made into a Centre of Excellence, we had to do something.
“There were always plans to do something with the accommodation upstairs here to complement our four operating theatres, but the plans got more grandiose as we went along. We have increased our bed capacity from 65 to 100 and, as well as building on an extension facing the Dublin Road, we have enhanced the rest of the building, making it a premises we can all be proud of and which meets the demands being put on it.”
The group is a not-for-profit organisation. All profits are reinvested into the hospitals and medical services, so they approached the latest refurb philosophically, though they couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out, says Gerry.
It is obvious that he loves his job and over the past two decades he has learned a lot about hospitals and how they work. He is as comfortable talking about medical specialities as he is about finance. And, though, when he was a student he had never envisaged working in a hospital, he sees it as running a business, just like any other industry, albeit that at times, the ‘product’ is about life and death.
He is not at all critical of the public hospitals. In fact, quite the opposite as he makes the point that private hospitals know how many beds they have, can judge the demand on their services and then budget accordingly.
“If we had the mix of clientele that UHG sees every day and are obliged not to turn away, there would be havoc here, too. But we don’t have an A&E that might threaten our elective surgery schedule. We are quite planned in what we do. There is a totally different dynamic in the private sector and it’s no different with private hospitals.”
Gerry is excited about further development at the Bons Secours with new specialties and believes that such developments have to be embraced by any private hospital which wants to stay in business. To date, the hospital has invested €50m in Galway.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
images/files/images/x3_Courthouse.jpg
Families queue up for school’s offer of free house
West has lower cancer survival rates than rest
Galway minors continue to lay waste to all opponents
Gardaí and IFA issue a joint appeal on summer road safety
Marathon Man plans to call a halt – but not before he hits 160 races
