Another one of the six actual planned new hospitals from Boris Johnson’s “fake forty” new hospitals promised last summer seems set to be rushed through with minimal scrutiny or consultation, and do far more harm than good to local services and capacity.
As local health chiefs and too many local politicians in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) apparently opt to turn a blind eye to the gaps and weaknesses in the plans, and grasp the promised £450m rather than risk delays, local campaigners are faced with the latest of a succession of half-baked plans that could leave the area desperately short of resources for decades to come.
In 2014 a Strategic Outline Case, bizarrely entitled Better Care Together, proposed shutting one of University Hospitals Leicester’s (UHL) three hospitals, axing 427 beds, with Leicestershire Partnership Trust, expected to take on the care of 250 “beds worth of activity” without any additional bed capacity.
Full story in The Lowdown, 26 October 2020