About IPATS
The Irish Paediatric Acute Transport Service (IPATS) serves approximately 1.1 million children within the Republic of Ireland by providing support to hospital sites that provide acute care to infants, children and adolescents.
IPATS supports the transfer of critically ill infants and children (aged 4 weeks to 16 years) from a referring hospital to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) in Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin or Temple Street Children’s University Hospital.
Our team consists of dedicated specialised Doctors and Nurses working within the 2 of the Children’s hospitals, Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin, Temple Street Children’s University Hospital. The IPATS team work in collaboration with the National Ambulance Service to deliver the service.
We aim to provide the highest quality of paediatric intensive care from the time of referral to handover in an intensive care unit, ensuring we facilitate the right patients receiving the right care in a timely manner.
Through our active education and outreach programme, we also aim to support and enable the delivery of high quality intensive care by local transport teams outside the hours of operation of IPATS.
Our vision is to provide a 24/7 service with the addition of clinical fellows and advanced nurse practitioners to further enhance our service delivery to the children of Ireland.
In 2023 we established the IPATS nurse led repatriation team, to facilitate the transfer of stable children back to their local hospital after care in CHI. This was established to enhance patient flow and ensure that children are brought closer to home and their families as soon as possible. This service has been a huge success and in its first year has won an IHCA award for best healthcare initiative, was highly commended in the HSE excellence awards and a second prize winner in the national patient flow awards.
We look forward to continuing to strive for the highest standards of care in paediatric transport.
National Clinical Lead for IPATS Dr Cathy Gibbons cathy.gibbons@hse.ie
National Retrieval Co-ordinators Ms Lorraine Heery lorraine.heery@hse.ie & Ms Isabel Flanagan isabel.flanagan1@hse.ie