An update will be provided on the UHL Hospitals Reconfiguration.
Minutes:
The Director of Strategy and Communications at University Hospitals Leicester (UHL) - Mike Wightman, along with several of his colleagues were all present at the meeting and provided an update in relation to the UHL reconfiguration.
The meeting was informed of the following, all to note:
· At the end of last year, the government noted that the University of Hospitals Leicester would be eligible for £450m of capital funding.
· This was a positive for Leicester as over the past 20-30 years in the NHS, two thirds of the bigger hospitals had received significant hospital investment and Leicester had not.
The following would be proposed:
1) Creation of a new hospital on the Glenfield Hospital site in the form of a treatment centre/ a day case hospital.
Will be doubling the intensive care capacity at Glenfield.
2) The Royal Infirmary hospital would be the home of a new maternity hospital.
Would also be doubling the intensive care capacity at the Royal Infirmary.
3) All children’s services would be bought together in a new stand-alone children’s hospital to be located at the Royal Infirmary by extending existing units. The children’s hospital will also be home to the new East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre.
4) The Leicester General hospital would no longer be an acute site, instead the focus of activity at this hospital would be a primary and community care hub, with onsite access to diagnostics.
The Director of Strategy and Communications at University Hospitals Leicester explained about the local development plan in relation to submitting a response and proposal ideas for the land.
Members and residents had the following concerns:
· Parking concerns - especially at the Royal Infirmary, it was noted that the multi-storey car park did make a difference. However, due to aging technology on the existing barrier system, there was a planned investment program taking place at the end of this year into next year which would replace some of the existing barriers with anticipations to achieve faster flow into/ out of car park.
· There were plans within the £450m funding spend to also invest into some of the car parks, which would be a combination of decking certain areas and building new multi-storey car parks across the Glenfield Hospital. These works were being developed collaboratively with organisations such as ‘Go Travel’.
· There were also plans to improve cycle networks and look at cycle pathways into the hospitals and storage.
· Bed capacity concerns – It was explained that the bed numbers would be increased over the lifetime of the plan and aspects taken into account to ensure the calculations for bed usage were detailed.
· Concerns of why not building one large hospital – it was responded that this would cost at least £2b and in this time especially with the pandemic it was not feasible. As a safety precaution, the two sites also allowed space for switching between the two for instance if something was to happen at one of the sites.
The next stages would be:
· A consultation would be taking place until 21st December 2020, information on this could be found online at the ‘building better hospitals’ website. Residents were encouraged to take part in the consultation and support was also available for this.
· There were two further public events taking place.
· After the 21st December 2020 an external company would look at the feedback and provide a report.
· The feedback would then be taken back to the Clinical Commission Group (CCG) who would make a decision on the final proposals.