Bon Secours hospital group plans €156m upgrade

Private hospital group Bon Secours Health System plans to spend almost €160 million on expanding and upgrading its facilities across the Republic.

The investment will include buying Barrington's Hospital in Limerick and a joint venture with University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre (UPMC), the US operator which controlled the Beacon Hospital before Denis O'Brien's takeover in 2014.

Bon Secours will spend €150 million on new theatres, clinics, beds and consultants’ rooms at the group’s hospitals and other centres Cork, Dublin, Kerry and Galway between now and 2020.

UPMC has agreed to contribute a further €6 million to the cost of a new radiotherapy cancer treatment centre at the Irish group's headquarters, the Bon Secours Hospital on College Road in Cork, bringing the total spend to €156 million.

Joint venture

Bon Secours chief executive Bill Maher said the treatment centre would be a joint venture between the Irish and US groups, which will split the €12 million development cost equally and take shares in a separate company that will run it.

“UPMC are going to provide the management of this centre,” Mr Maher said. “We are good at a lot of things here, but they are world leaders in this field.”

UPMC is a not-for-profit hospital operator and health insurer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the US. It runs more than 20 hospitals and employs 60,000 people.

The US group already runs a cancer treatment facility at Whitfield in Waterford. It controlled the Beacon Hospital in Sandyford, Dublin, before Mr O'Brien took it over by buying the Irish company's debt in early 2014.

Bon Secours will spend a total of €75 million in Cork, €64 million on its hospital and €11 million on a care centre just outside the city. It will develop endoscopy and day services in Dublin, a laboratory in Galway and theatres in Tralee.

It recently agreed to buy Barrington's Hospital in Limerick for a reported €15 million from surgeon Paul Byrne, its owner. Bon Secours is waiting for approval from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission before going ahead with the purchase.