A lack of government funding has left hospitals at risk of roofs collapsing and flooding, according to several NHS bosses.
At the 2019 general election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to build 40 new hospitals by 2030. However, government funding has not been released for most hospital rebuild programmes, reports The Mirror.
At that election, the scheme was touted as the “biggest hospital building programme in a generation”. As yet, only one hospital rebuild has been carried out and most have not been started.
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Royal Liverpool University Hospital flooded 10 times in 2018, causing delays to patient care and forcing staff to wear wellies. Elsewhere, hospital leaders reported having to evacuate one critical care ward because the ceiling was about to fall in.
An NHS chief executive, speaking anonymously, said: “That would have meant concrete falling down on the head of a member of staff or a patient, so we had to extract our patients within two hours.” Another chief executive said one hospital building - which is “older than the NHS ” - has leaking roofs meaning that water pours down the walls when it rains.
A third hospital floods every year due to a major problem with its sewage system and has to evacuate patients from wards. Another NHS chief executive, bidding for their hospital to be added to the rebuild programme, said: “If we don’t have the new hospital by 2030 we will actually have to close the doors.”
Half of bosses polled at the hospitals promised rebuilds are “not confident” or “not at all confident” that the funding they have been allocated is sufficient to deliver their project. Saffron Cordery, chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “This kind of political paralysis and instability is deeply unhelpful for the NHS when we’ve got a whole range of critical decisions that need to be made.
“The new hospital programme was already moving at a glacial pace and any political paralysis which will slow this progress even further will just be deeply unhelpful to trusts and their local communities who are waiting for decisions.
“Trusts want to redevelop their hospital sites or build new hospitals because there is an urgent need to do so, whether that’s to do with quality of care, efficiency, productivity or indeed patient safety. On a day when we see huge political chaos, with a Government that’s unable to govern effectively and make decisions, that really amplifies the impact of what’s happening for the new hospital programme, which is significant delays and challenges.”
The New Hospitals Plan (NHP), first announced in 2019, came with a promised spending package of £3.7 billion. NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts, said the real cost of building 40 new hospitals would be more like £20 billion.
It emerged that many “new hospitals” were in fact alterations, and some were delayed refurbishments that had been announced years earlier. NHS Providers received responses from chief executives at 26 NHS trusts representing three quarters of those involved in the NHP.
Some 35 trusts were listed as included in the NHP, some of which are developing multiple sites. Almost two in five hospitals (39%) have their completion date behind schedule. Of these, almost half of the projects (46%) have had their timescales publicly reset. Of those with completion dates behind schedule, most (62%) said the delays affected their trust’s ability to deliver safe and effective patient care.
A Department of Health and Care spokesperson said: “We will deliver 40 new hospitals by 2030. Together with eight existing schemes, this will mean 48 hospitals delivered by the end of the decade, with six currently under construction and one now complete.
“We are working closely with NHS trusts in the programme on the development of their building plans. Each of the building projects will be new hospitals providing brand new, state-of-the-art facilities to ensure world-class provision of healthcare for NHS patients and staff by replacing outdated infrastructure.”
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