|
|
 |
|
| |
Top e-government news, updated daily, and regular features from the top people in the public sector.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| PFI hospitals go ahead, but face more surgery |
|
The Treasury has given the go-ahead for another two major PFI acute hospital redevelopment schemes. However, £21.7m has been cut from the £559m University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust redevelopment, while £42m has been lopped off the £338m St Helen’s and Knowsley NHS Trust scheme.
Like the £1bn Barts Hospital scheme, the two schemes were held up at the 11th hour after health secretary Patricia Hewitt ordered costs on all three schemes to be reviewed last January. At the same time, all Trusts were ordered to review costs on any planned redevelopment work, triggering a hiatus in hospital schemes coming to market.
Richard Glenn, capital developments director at the South Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, has been seconded to the Department of Health (DoH) private finance unit to run the rule over all major PFI acute hospital schemes in a bid to fast-track their reviews.
Glenn’s appointment is significant, since his Trust’s Torbay Hospital redevelopment scheme is held by DoH officials as a model of how acute hospitals must respond to the shift in the provision of healthcare at a local level. The DoH is keen to fast-track all schemes in the review to allay any loss of confidence in the PFI market.
The Birmingham Hospitals scheme will lose three 36-bed wards from the first phase, although these may be built in a later phase, if the need is proven. A car park has also been dropped from the scheme, and instead will be built using public capital.
A spokesman for the preferred bidder of the Birmingham scheme, the Balfour Beatty-led Consort Healthcare consortium, said: “There are very few changes. The scheme came through relatively unscathed. It passed all the tests.”
Consort will deliver a new acute hospital, as well as an A&E centre, specialist burns and transplant wards, a decontamination suite and operating theatres.
Preferred bidder Taylor Woodrow declined to comment on the cuts to the St Helen’s redevelopment. The St Helen’s scheme will see the redevelopment of St Helen’s and Whiston hospitals, including a new diagnostic treatment centre at St Helens and a new 963-bed acute hospital at Whiston.
However, the seventh floor at Whiston has been removed, while the St Helens site has lost an intermediate care unit. Furthermore, at Whiston the sixth floor will be built, but shelled.
A DoH spokesman said the scale of the cuts should not be taken as typical. "These figures should not be read as indicative of how other schemes may be be affected. As the DoH has made clear, Trusts need to make sure their schemes are affordable to their local NHS economy." |
|
|
|
