BRI boss: “We need a new hospital”
Trust chief highlights Bradford Royal Infirmary's a hundred years old
The boss of Bradford Royal Infirmary has told Councillors: “We need a new hospital, plain and simple.”
Professor Mel Pickup, Chief Executive Officer of the Bradford Teaching Hospital Foundation Trust, made the claim at a meeting on Thursday, when she pointed out that much of BRI was built a century ago.
She told members of Bradford Council’s Health and Social Care Scrutiny Committee that it would likely cost more to repair, expand and upgrade the existing hospital building than it would to build a new, state of the art hospital.
The call was made several years after BRI was overlooked in the Government’s “New Hospital Programme” – a scheme that would have seen the hospital and St Lukes both flattened and re-built on a single site.
The Scrutiny Committee were discussing the Baroness Amos review into maternity care, which was published earlier this year.
Bradford Royal Infirmary was one of the hospitals that the review looked at.
The review found that the maternity system in England is no longer fit to consistently deliver high-quality, compassionate care to every woman and family, and requires urgent reform.
Numerous concerns were raised about the experience of women experiencing maternity care in BRI.
At the meeting Ms Pickup apologised over the findings, and the Amos report was discussed for over two hours by Councillors from across the political spectrum.
One of the issues was that the ageing inner city hospital was not capable of delivering everything expected of a modern health facility.
Ms Pickup said: “We need a new hospital in Bradford, plain and simple.
“BRI is one of the older hospitals in Yorkshire. In was built, in a large part, nearly 100 years ago, and it has expanded beyond the capability of providing modern health care.
“Anyone who has used the A&E will recognise this.
“We need a new hospital.”
Councillor Hawarun Hussain (Green, Shipley) said: “What is NHS England saying about this?”
Ms Pickup pointed out that in 2020 the Trust made a case for a complete re-build of the hospital as part of the Government’s New Hospital Programme, but it was not supported. She said: “There were about 150 applicants in that process.”
Airedale Hospital was selected for the rebuild programme due to the poor stat of the building – much of the hospital was built with dangerous RAAC concrete.
That rebuild is expected to cost between a £1 billion to £1.5 billion, and is currently in the planning stage.
Ms Pickup said: “Airedale’s issues took precedence, but our challenges continue.
“Over the coming decades we’ll end up spending as much or more on repairing the hospital and modernising it as it would take to build a new hospital.
“We’re maintaining a very old infrastructure, things are constantly breaking down and needing repair. We do what we can with the money we are able to secure, but it all feels piecemeal.”
The issue was re-visited later in the meeting when Sara Hollins, Director of Midwifery, Bradford Teaching Hospitals Trust, detailed how the constraints of the building impacted the maternity service.
She said: “The building wasn’t made for the volume of people we have now.
“In the maternity service people often stay longer so there is a pressure for space. But our estate is our estate.
“The building hasn’t kept up with the changes to clinical practice. We need a new hospital that is more fit for purpose. We need more side rooms, which is what women want, and more delivery rooms.
“We have to work with what we’ve got, we have to expand and improve where we can.”
She said the hope was that when the full set of recommendations from the Amos review are released, this will lead to funding to help improve the hospital estate.
When the funding bid for a new build to replace BRI was first proposed, Ms Pickup said: “We want to create modern health and care facilities that support our people and our citizens by securing safe, efficient and fit for purpose hospitals and healthcare for generations to come.
“We are excited by the opportunity that could be presented to us to really transform the way care is provided for our patients and their families.”
In 2023 it was announced that while Airedale Hospital would get funding for a rebuild, the BRI replacement would not.