New home ‘delivered’ for UCC’s College of Medicine and Health

11 Nov 2016

Simon Coveney TD, Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, has today opened the new home for the University College Cork’s College of Medicine and Health’s Offices in Erinville, where generations of babies entered this world- where so many lives, and so many stories began.

University College Cork is the primary academic partner of the South/South West Hospital Group, which consists of a group of nine hospitals in the south and southwest of Ireland. The co-location of UCC’s College of Medicine and Health and the Hospital Group in the same building will allow UCC to further nurture and foster the pre-existing relationship between both parties, and will reinforce UCC’s enhanced co-operation with the South/South West Hospital Group as they continue to reform, integrate and modernise the delivery of healthcare across the region.

UCC President Dr. Michael B. Murphy welcomed today’s announcement and stated that: “To-date we have seen that University College Cork’s academic partnership with the South/South West Hospital Group is much more than a mere alignment for the benefit of our students. Across the Hospital Group, doctors, nurses, midwifes and clinicians utilise the link to our university on a daily basis. That interconnected link has brought tremendous rewards, and has resulted in a change of culture that brings benefits to society at large. The co-location of the College of Medicine and Health at Erinville, will result in closer co-operation and will reinforce the relationship that we have built since the establishment of the South/South West Hospital Group.”

UCC’s College of Medicine and Health educates the next generation of health care practitioners through its undergraduate and postgraduate professional programmes. These programmes are vocational in nature, and built across clinical training in hospitals across the South/South West Hospital Group. As such, delivery of teaching is inextricably intertwined with the work of these health care centres.

Chief Executive Officer of the South/South West Hospital Group, Gerry O’Dwyer stated that: “Since the inception of hospital groups, we have seen the tangible benefits that the link to an academic partner has achieved. Both the South/South West Hospital Group and UCC understand that our relationship has been constructed on the certainty that the choice is not between change and no change, reform or no reform, but between the various approaches to reform that we can take. UCC’s move to Erinville displays our close working relationship, and will reinforce the way in which we run, manage and organise our hospital group in the years ahead.”