Some hospitals are so dilapidated that they regularly have to shut wards and operating theatres to safeguard patients’ safety, a senior NHS boss has admitted.
Julian Kelly, NHS England’s deputy chief executive, made the statement when giving evidence to the House of Commons public accounts committee on Thursday.
He was being questioned about the progress of the government’s pledge to build 40 new hospitals by 2030. Kelly told MPs that some NHS facilities were in such disrepair that the health service had “examples all the time where hospitals are having to shut units, decant patients into other spaces, where we are losing theatres … which limits our capacity to treat patients”.
Kelly was referring to problems caused by hospitals being left structurally unsound either because they are made of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) or because their environment has deteriorated over recent years as the NHS’s capital budget has been squeezed.
“We have hospital teams which are managing these sort of issues day in and day out,” Kelly said. “And so we have examples of managing fire risk, flooding … a lot of this is because we know we’ve seen a big increase in backlog maintenance and we know there was a pause in investment in new hospital infrastructure.”
The cost of addressing the backlog of maintenance across the NHS estate in England has risen to a record £10.2bn, of which £1.8bn is needed for repairs of “high-risk” problems.
For example, the Queen Elizabeth hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, had to mothball four of its operating theatres between September 2022 and May this year to allow “failsafing work” to take place across the site, to stop ceilings and walls from collapsing due to Raac.
Under the hospital’s ongoing “decant programme” some of its clinical services and wards are being moved into a temporary area while steel supports are inserted to reduce the risk of its roof falling down because of Raac, a hospital spokesperson said. The programme is 40% completed, she added.
Amanda Pritchard, NHS England’s chief executive, told the MPs that hospital staff found it “really quite burdensome” to monitor Raac. Even enhanced monitoring of the concrete “does not, and can’t completely, eliminate the risk from Raac,” she said. The NHS is implementing a plan to eradicate all Raac from its estate by 2035.
Doncaster Royal infirmary is at risk of “enforced closure” because it is experiencing so many problems related to the fact that it is so old, the Health Service Journal reported this week. In May it was removed without explanation from the list of 40 new hospitals that are due to be rebuilt.
At the PAC hearing, Kelly and Shona Dunn, the Department of Health and Social Care’s second permanent secretary, confirmed that the promised 40 new hospitals would not be built by 2030.
Meanwhile, new research by the House of Commons library shows that the seven hospitals worst-affected by Raac have 1.9 million people in the populations they serve and employ 43,000 staff.
“It is frankly a national scandal that so many people live in areas with hospital buildings at risk of collapse”, said Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, which requested the analysis.
“Hard-working doctors and nurses were the heroes of the pandemic and deserve better than to work in unsafe conditions under roofs at risk of collapse.
“This feels like a disaster waiting to happen with the NHS”, he added.
