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Pounds-180m Shake-Up for Health Serv Ices NHS Lothian Wins Go-Ahead

Posted on: Thursday, 28 July 2005, 09:01 CDT

A pounds-180m spending programme representing the largest ever review of health services in the Lothians was approved yesterday by Andy Kerr, Scotland's health minister.

The approval, in a letter from the Scottish Executive, means that NHS Lothian, the country's second largest health board, can now press ahead with its proposed measures, some of them controversial.

The programme involves plans to close hospitals, sell off land and bring specialist acute care services together to create modern centres of excellence.

The proposals, which will affect services employing 54-per cent of the workforce and which focuses on moving toward more local delivery, includes a pounds-75m new-build Royal Edinburgh Hospital with 219 beds.

It will involve expanded community mental health services, acute in-patient beds, increased accommodation places, and psychiatry of old age services.

The site of the Royal Victoria Hospital will be disposed of and funding reinvested to provide a purpose-built pounds-15m facility at the nearby Western General Hospital.

Campaigners have been particularly upset at the move to close what was at one time an internationally-renowned centre for geriatrics and still provides services for the elderly.

It is understood that hundreds of members of the Scottish Pensioners' Association wrote to NHS Lothian asking that the Royal Victoria be improved and upgraded to a centre of excellence for older people. However. health chiefs maintain it is not suitable for providing twenty-first century medical care.

The land on which the 200bed hospital stands is a prime development site on Craigleith Road between Comely Bank and Blackhall.

Also planned is a "24/7 mental health resource centre" at a new Haddington Hospital which would mean more local crisis intervention and support with less need for patients to have to transfer to Edinburgh.

A new pounds-15m Midlothian Community Hospital will replace Loanhead and Rosslynlee hospitals.

The minister also approved the transfer of most in-patient and day-case ENT surgery to St John's Hospital in Livingston to support the creation of a specialist head and neck unit.

Eddie Egan, deputy chairman of the board of NHS Lothian which met yesterday, said that he was delighted that the minister had approved proposals which would give the Lothian public a more modern, efficient and patient-centred health service.

Source: Herald, The; Glasgow (UK)

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