Twenty hospitals in England will be receiving an extra £850m of funding to go towards upgrades for outdated facilities and new equipment. The £850m will be spread out over five years and will come on top of an extra £20bn a year by 2023.
Some of the money will be used to build a new women’s and children’s hospital in Cornwall.
The 20 NHS trusts receiving funding for hospital upgrades are:
• Norfolk & Norwich University Hospitals – £69.7m to provide diagnostic and assessment centres in Norwich, Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn for cancer and non-cancerous disease
• Norfolk and Suffolk – £40m to build four new hospital wards in Norwich, providing 80 beds
• South Norfolk Clinical Commissioning Group – £25.2m to develop and improve primary care services in South Norfolk.
• Luton & Dunstable University Hospital – £99.5m for a new block in Luton to provide critical and intensive care, as well as a delivery suite and operating theatres
• University Hospitals Birmingham – £97.1m to provide a new purpose-built hospital facility replacing outdated outpatient, treatment and diagnostic accommodation
• United Lincolnshire Hospitals – £21.3m to develop urgent and emergency care zones in A&E
• Wye Valley – £23.6m to provide new hospital wards in Hereford, providing 72 beds
• University Hospitals of North Midlands – £17.6m to three new modern wards to improve capacity in Stoke, delivering approximately 84 beds for this winter
• Barking, Havering and Redbridge CCGs and North East London – £17m to develop a new health and wellbeing hub in north east London
• Croydon Health Services – £12.7m to extend and refurbish critical care units at the Croydon University Hospital
• South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Integrated Care System – £57.5m for primary care investment across South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw
• The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals – £41.7m to improve paediatric cardiac services in the north east
• Leeds Teaching Hospitals – £12m to provide a single laboratory information management system across West Yorkshire and Harrogate, covering all pathology disciplines
• Greater Manchester Mental Health – £72.3m to build a new adult mental health inpatient unit in Manchester
• Mersey Care – £33m to provide a new 40-bed low secure unit for people with learning disabilities
• Stockport – £30.6m to provide a new emergency care campus development at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, incorporating an urgent treatment centre, GP assessment unit and planned investigation unit
• Wirral Clinical Commissioning Group – £18m to improve patient flow by improving access via the urgent treatment centre
• Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care – £16.3m to provide emergency and urgent care facilities at Tameside General Hospital in Ashton-under-Lyne
• Isle of Wight – £48m to redesign acute services for Isle of Wight residents
• Royal Cornwall Hospitals – £99.9m to build a new women and children’s hospital in Truro.
Responding to the funding announcement, the Health Foundation said “years of under-investment in the NHS’s infrastructure means this extra money risks being little more than a drop in the ocean”.
In a statement about the NHS before his visit, Johnson said: “With our doctors and nurses working tirelessly day in day out, this treasured institution truly showcases the very best of Britain. That’s why I made it my immediate task to make sure frontline services have the funding they need to make a real difference to the lives of NHS staff and, above all, of patients.”
Nigel Edwards, the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a healthcare thinktank, said: “This is a welcome down payment on the staggering £6bn needed to clear the backlog of NHS maintenance but it will only be a fraction of what it would cost to really upgrade 20 hospitals. Nobody should expect shiny new hospitals in their towns any time soon.”
