Plans for new £27m Hospital in Ludlow scrapped
Plans for a new £27m community hospital in Ludlow were today scrapped.
The Shropshire Community Health Trust decided put an end to the plans at a meeting this morning.
The planned community hospital would have provided 36 inpatient beds, co-located carers suite, outpatient clinics, an imaging suite, medical day case centre and enhanced procedures suite for minor surgery and endoscopy, as well as a healthy living centre.
A midwifery led unit, two independent GP surgeries and a base for administrative staff was also planned.
Speaking about the decision to stop the new health facility project, Interim Chief Executive, Julia Bridgewater said:
“It has been a tough decision and we really regret having to make it, but it would have been wrong to have continued with the new build which would have left the NHS community with a £20 million debt over the next 25 years – a debt of £20m over a generation.
“During the planning period, the scheme has been affected by changes in clinical policy and NHS structures, and in the current financial climate it is difficult to invest in buildings when pressure on front line staff continues to increase.
“As such, our commitment remains to our patients, the services they need and the staff who provide them, not just bricks and mortar. We have an existing hospital in Ludlow and the Trust Board has strongly agreed that we should continue to invest in this to deliver improvements to existing patient services and make the best use of new health technologies.
“I know this is hugely disappointing to local residents and our staff who were all keen to see the new hospital which had been planned for so long, but we hope they will understand that it was a decision we had to take, and that it would have been irresponsible to continue.”
At the Board meeting, Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust agreed to invest around £160K in the current Ludlow Hospital in order to make it compliant in terms of delivering care for the next 2 to 5 years. It has also pledged to look at how Ludlow could be used as a test-bed for innovative delivery of integrated community health services, which would be informed by the Shropshire-wide Clinical Services Strategy work, which has just begun.
The Trust had previously asked Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group whether it could provide the additional £1.1 million annual running costs but it decided at a board meeting last month that it was unable to do so, as it would mean taking money away from frontline services to pay for a building.
