Crumbling estate impacting patient care ‘day in, day out’, NHSE boss tells MPs

NHS England’s finance boss has said patient treatment areas are being closed “all the time” due to crumbling estates, fire risks and flooding.

Julian Kelly told MPsthe health service had “examples all the time where hospitals are having to shut units, decant patients into other spaces, where we are losing theatres… which limits our capacity to treat patients”.

It comes amid the national controversy around the government’s investment into public buildings, sparked by the sudden closure of dozens of school buildings with unsafe structures known as ‘reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete’.

He said: “We have hospital teams which are managing these sort of issues day in and day out. And so we have examples of managing fire risk, flooding… a lot of this is because we know we’ve seen a big increase in backlog maintenance and we know there was a pause in investment in new hospital infrastructure.”

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Source: HSJ, 7 September 2023