NHS leaders have urged Boris Johnson’s government to build 100 new hospitals and give the service an extra £7bn a year for new facilities and equipment.
They want the prime minister to commit to far more than the 40 new hospitals over the next decade that the Conservatives pledged during the general election.
So many hospitals, clinics and mental health units are dilapidated after years of underinvestment in the NHS’s capital budget that a spending splurge on new buildings is needed, bosses say. Too many facilities are cramped and growing numbers are unsafe for patients and staff, they claim.
Johnson has promised £2.7bn to rebuild six existing hospitals and pledged to build 40 in total and upgrade 20 others, although has been criticised for a lack of detail on the latter two pledges.
The call has come from NHS Providers, which represents the bosses of the 240 NHS trusts in England that provide acute, mental health, ambulance and community-based services.
The government needs to match the scale and ambition of the more than 100 new hospitals built between 1997 and 2015 under the controversial private finance initiative, and the 95 created in the first three years of the ”hospital plan” construction programme in the 1960s, they say.
They argue Johnson’s pledges, while welcome, “fall well short of what is needed” across the NHS, and that his planned 40 hospitals represent “a much more modest ambition than what was achieved under those previous initiatives”.
East Devon Watch 