[ad_1]
Ministers have elaborated on Boris Johnson’s much-scrutinized electoral promise to build 40 new hospitals in England, revealing that most of the projects involve reconstruction or consolidation, and that only four have been started.
The plan comes with a promised £ 3.7bn spending package. However, NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts, said the actual cost of building 40 new hospitals would be more than £ 20bn.
The plan to build 40 hospitals by 2030, first made by Health Secretary Matt Hancock at last year’s Conservative party conference, and repeated many times by Johnson during the subsequent election campaign, was criticized at that time. moment to be based more on aspiration than defined plans.
Experts said the initial program involved most of the money going to just six sites, with a much smaller £ 100 million pot set aside for seed funding among 34 hospitals, with little indication of how much money would be available overall.
Details set Friday by the health department list 40 projects to be completed by 2030 under the government’s health infrastructure plan, with another eight sites invited to bid for funding.
Of the 40, 26 are part of the second phase of the infrastructure plan, which will be developed between 2025 and 2030. Six more are expected in the first phase, for 2025. Of the remaining eight, four are already under construction and four more are waiting for final approval.
Furthermore, more than half of the projects are not new hospitals as such, but include reconstruction projects at existing sites, consolidations of other hospitals or additional units.
The four already under construction are at Sandwell in the West Midlands, North Cumbria, Liverpool and Brighton. Those awaiting approval are in London, Morpeth in Northumberland, Manchester and Nottingham.
Johnson said: “The dedication and tireless efforts of our nurses, physicians and all healthcare workers have kept the NHS open during this pandemic. But no matter what this virus throws at us, we are determined to build back better and deliver the largest hospital building program in a generation. “
Saffron Cordery, Deputy Executive Director of NHS Providers, welcomed the announcement, but warned that the 40 new hospitals would cost around £ 20bn, most of which should be found in the next few years: “Build a new mid-size hospital costs around £ 500 million, so [£3.7bn] it’s just a down payment. “
He added: “If the government wants these hospitals to be built in the time it specifies, the trusts will need the rest of the capital to be allocated as soon as possible.”
The announcement also lacked “any significant investment in our mental health estate,” he said.
Cordery said: “Any additional funding to address long-forgotten infrastructure and facilities to ensure high-quality and safe care is welcome and several trusts have well-developed plans to get this important work underway.”
Shadow mental health minister Rosena Allin-Khan said the announcement was “a missed opportunity and extremely disappointing.”
She said: “It is an insult that mental health, which accounts for a quarter of all health needs, has lost again. The government must take mental health seriously and provide the resources and facilities it needs. “
Nigel Edwards, executive director of the health think-tank Nuffield Trust, said the £ 3.7 billion reflected the “party after famine” approach that recent governments had taken to funding NHS capital – the money it uses to building and modernizing facilities and purchasing equipment such as scanners and information technology, and that had made planning new projects difficult.
“This funding does not compensate for the fact that the health service has not had an adequate strategic vision of capital investment for many years,” he said.
The Royal College of Nursing also cautioned that as significant as the hospital spending is, this will not make up for the nursing staff shortage. Donna Kinnair, its general secretary, said: “Whether the hospitals are rebuilt or completely new, they will have a difficult time providing safe patient care without enough nurses. Unfair wages are pushing nurses out of the jobs they love when England’s NHS is already losing tens of thousands. “
