Keeping the Bons Secours at cutting edge of medical care

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.