New ambulance centre has gone out to tender

(Above) Mullingar's new ambulance centre will be based on the Delvin Road.

The contracts for the new HSE ambulance centre in Mullingar have been put out to tender.

The town’s ambulance centre is moving from the grounds of the Midland Regional Hospital Mullingar to a purpose-built home on the Delvin Road.

The new facility will consist of a single-pitch ambulance building, comprising administration and staff accommodation, an enclosed ambulance parking area, a covered ambulance parking space, 16 car parking spaces, a boundary fence with swing gates to the north east, and solar heating panels to the roof.

It is being relocated to the Delvin Road site to facilitate the construction of a major extension to the radiology department that will also house the hospital’s long awaited MRI scanner.

The contracts for the new MRI unit at the hospital were scheduled to go out to tender last month and work is expected to begin on the project early next year.

The Friends of Regional Hospital Mullingar raised in the region of €1m to fund the purchase of the MRI scanner, while the HSE will fund the construction and running costs of the unit.

Speaking to the Westmeath Examiner recently, the chairman of the Friends of Regional Hospital Mullingar, John McGrath, said that the group is looking forward to the project progressing.

“We’ve been waiting for it for some time and we will be pushing them. In fairness, from the original timescale they gave us a year ago, there has only been one month’s slippage due to Covid-19. If they hit the targets that they now have, we will be very pleased. The original plan was that they would have a contractor on site this side of Christmas but now the contractor is due on site in January.”

The deadline for tenders for the new ambulance centre is December 14.