Major developments at Trust confirmed in Government’s hospital building programme
The Prime Minister has confirmed major redevelopments for all three of our main hospital sites as part of a new announcement on the Government’s health infrastructure plan. He said that 40 hospitals will be built by 2030, with eight additional schemes invited to bid. The 40 hospitals includes, in phase 2, a rebuild of St Mary’s, a floor-by-floor refurbishment of Charing Cross and a mix of redevelopment and new build at Hammersmith Hospital.
Trust redevelopment director Matt Tulley said: “This is very welcome news and we are anticipating more detail shortly to understand what it means for timescales and funding approach.”
“Our hospitals are some of the busiest in London, providing care for around 1.3 million people a year. However, many of our buildings are very old and in poor condition giving us the largest backlog maintenance liability of any NHS trust in England. Our staff have responded brilliantly to Covid-19, but our facilities have made it much harder. We want hospitals that support the highest quality care, that help us continue our long legacy of research and innovation and provide the best possible working environment for our staff. We also want to meet new aspirations for ‘user-focus’ community partnership, integrated care and sustainability.”
We launched our latest redevelopment programme last year – starting with St Mary’s as the site in most urgent need. We have recently submitted the first step in the NHS approval process – a ‘strategic outline case’ for St Mary’s that makes the case for a complete rebuild on the east of the site. We await a decision on the case before we can move onto developing detailed plans for St Mary’s while, at the same time, beginning to work up strategic outline cases for our other redevelopments.
We are committed to involving staff, patients, local communities and other stakeholders at every stage in our redevelopment. We started this summer with an initial phase of user insight research - you can read about the findings on our website. We’re now working up a detailed programme of partnership working and involvement as part of our overall planning as we get the go ahead to progress.
Our redevelopment plans reflect the need for at least the same number of inpatient beds at all three of our main sites and probably more. We are also committed to full accident and emergency (A&E) departments at both St Mary’s and Charing Cross hospitals. And we will include integrated care hubs in partnership with other health and care providers at St Mary’s and Charing Cross and that we will continue to expand our digital offer and ‘outreach’ into community facilities, again working in partnership with others.
The Prime Minister’s announcement made on 2 October follows on from a previous announcement in September last year, which launched the health infrastructure plan, a rolling five-year programme of investment in health infrastructure, including capital to build new hospitals, modernise primary care estate, and invest in new diagnostics and technology. So far, we have received ‘seed funding’ to begin planning for our schemes.
