Need "crystallised" for North Devon hospital improvements

It needs eight new operating theatres and intensive care beds

Bosses at North Devon District Hospital say they can’t wait 15 years for crumbling critical care infrastructure to be replaced.

Last week they learned that the hospital in Barnstaple, where many of the buildings are nearly 50 years old, is in the final phase of the government’s New Hospital Programme, with 25 others around the country taking priority.

Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s chief executive Sam Higginson told board members it would be 2040 before a replacement hospital would be complete.

“We simply cannot wait 15 years for new hospital infrastructure,” he said.

A campaign is building for an urgent cash injection. Mr Higginson said £50 million would be needed over the next two to three years.

“Our biggest fear is that we have a critical estate failure meaning we will no longer be able to run the hospital in the way we currently do, and if we do not have operating theatres we cannot run an emergency department or a maternity unit,” he said.

“The scale of the potential impact could be enormous for the community of North Devon as well as having knock on impact on the community of East Devon as patients would come down the link road to the RD&E at Exeter and we haven’t got any capacity here either.”

He said they would be lobbying “very, very hard” for money from the Department of Health and the New Hospital team to prevent further deterioration of the hospital.

MPs and staff are joining the fight as the delay has “crystallised the need” for improvement, according to one board member.

Risks at the hospital include ageing air conditioning units which are being “patched up” and lifts.  It also needs eight extra operating theatres and eight new intensive care beds.

The clinical lead for the Our Future Hospital (OFH) programme at the hospital, Professor David Sanders, told visiting Liberal Democrat MPs last October that the hospital now served a very different purpose and population than 50 years ago.

He described the situation as a “ticking time bomb waiting to go off.”

In the House of Commons on Wednesday those same MPs, North Devon’s Ian Roome and party leader Sir Ed Davey, demanded that a construction date be brought forward.

The Lib Dems claim the hospital needs £44 million of repairs, with 25 per cent identified as ‘high risk’ repairs, meaning that failure to address them urgently could lead to serious injury and major disruption to services.

An open letter started by Mr Roome challenging health secretary Wes Streeting to visit the hospital has gathered over 5,000 signatures.

At prime minister’s questions, Mr Roome told Sir Keir Starmer the investment delay was “devastating”.

He continued: “In the five years since the last government’s empty promises, our hospital’s maintenance backlog has grown to over £40 million.

“Given that £200 million has reportedly been spent just on consultancy fees for the New Hospital Programme, what funding for extra maintenance will be available to those hospitals that now face another decade of waiting?

Sir Kier said the hospital would not have been delivered at all under the Conservatives, who owed Mr Roome’s constituents an apology.

The New Hospital Programme was drawn up by the Conservatives and reviewed when Labour came into power. But the new government said the Tories plan to complete 40 new hospitals by 2030 was “unfunded and undeliverable”.

The prime minister told the Commons: “We have put in place a funded, deliverable plan that will see the hospital built and we will work closely with the trust to accelerate work.”

Sir Ed Davey later said: “For these patients and staff it means there is still no end in sight to the dangerous delays to vital treatment and the buildings they use will have the potential to collapse around them for years to come.

“The prime minister has embraced the false economy of dither and delay. This project will only become more expensive, with patients suffering the consequences, the longer they are delayed. The government must now realise this and bring the construction dates forward.”

The governmment’s plan for hospital construction is in three waves of five years each, with North Devon in the last wave, with a starting date expected between 2035 and 2038.