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.

NAS-CCRS received the gift of a BUMBLEance Critical Care Ambulance from the Saoirse Foundation some years back for our IPATS team. It was an amazing gift, as it provided resilience to our fleet as we began to deliver our IPATS services. However, it quickly became clear to us and to anyone onlooking, that when this BUMBLEance is travelling under blue lights and sirens, there is a very precious cargo on board.
Yet again the Saoirse foundation have generously donated another new BUMBLEance to the IPATS team. We are honoured and grateful for this amazing gift, in which we will deliver paediatric critical care services across all parts of Ireland, and bring them safely to the Intensive Care Units in Children’s Health Ireland at Crumlin or at Temple Street

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