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The UK government is expected to announce plans for hospital funding next week after Chancellor Rachel Reeves ordered a review in July in an effort to fix public finances, which had a £22bn shortfall. This includes funds that had been promised to London hospitals like Sutton’s St Helier Hospital. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said that the government intended to rebuild the NHS.
Despite the hospital having been promised new buildings along with upgrades to existing ones, staff at St Helier say that this has yet to occur. Since opening in 1941, St Helier Hospital has received a number of funding promises from different governments, and in 2010, Conservative George Osborne pledged £200m toward funding an array of new hospital schemes, including a project at St Helier.
When Boris Johnson was prime minister in 2020, his government promised to invest up to £500m into St Helier as part of the New Hospitals Programme. However, there have been a host of issues at the hospital, including the failure of windows to close correctly, resulting in damp, a situation that was cited as the cause of more than 600 cancelled operations last year due to ventilation issues in theatres, said Dr Beccy Suckling, the hospital’s chief medical officer. Dr Pauline Swift, a consultant nephrologist at St Helier, said that lifts frequently break down and boarded-up windows in the dialysis unit.
The Department of Health and Social Care agreed that buildings and equipment across the NHS had deteriorated, causing havoc for patients and staff. Labour, which came to power after the New Hospital Programme was initiated, said that it would investigate the future viability of projects forming part of the scheme, which had been initiated by Johnson. The Department of Health and Social Care said that it had “inherited an unrealistic and unaffordable New Hospital Programme”, and that it was now developing a timeline for hospital funding that was feasible and transparent
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