Tonight:
9°c
Crumbling hospitals are breeding ground for superbugs
Ruth Bloomfield29.12.08
LONDON'S hospitals are crumbling under a billion-pound repair backlog, it emerged today.
Figures show that the cost of bringing each hospital in the capital up to scratch stands at £1.2billion.
NHS chiefs admitted that £300 million of maintenance is now needed urgently to protect the welfare of patients and staff. Geoff Martin, campaigns director at London Health Emergency, said: "These figures are breathtaking and show that there have been years of under-investment in London's hospitals.
"This is not just about hospitals looking horrible. There is a knock-on effect on patient care."
He said a lack of investment in buildings contributed to Britain's worst hospital bug outbreak at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust, in which 90 patients died from Clostridium difficile. "If you have got bad windows and ventilation, or flaking paint and cracked floors, this is a breeding ground for bugs," he added.
Critics say the Government's enthusiasm for building new hospitals and polyclinics means maintenance work on existing buildings is being overlooked, especially if they are privately earmarked for future downgrading.
The figures, revealed in Parliament, show the London maintenance backlog accounts for about a quarter of the total national backlog of £4billion for the year to last April.
It means millions must be spent on all hospitals other than foundation trusts, walk-in centres, other primary care trust buildings and a few GP surgeries.
London Health Emergency claimed that a new blueprint for healthcare in the capital, which promotes the idea of replacing GP surgeries with polyclinics, and introducing enlarged "specialist" hospitals, was partly to blame for the lack of spending on maintenance on existing building stock.
A spokesman for NHS London said: "As with any other NHS area we have large numbers of older buildings, for which the cost of maintenance is higher." He said that NHS London had plans to cut the backlog of the most urgent work by 10 per cent. "There is significant rebuilding work going on at hospitals, the largest of which is the Royal London, [but] more recently there have been new buildings at Central Middlesex, University College London and other hospitals.
"The NHS in London has generated a surplus of over £200 million over the past financial year. This will be invested in future healthcare, part of which will include the maintenance backlog."
