Portsmouth NHS sites need £1.2m worth of repairs to sort 'high risk' maintenance backlog

Latest figures from NHS Digital show that at the end of March last year, Solent NHS Trust had incurred a massive backlog of maintenance required at its sites.

More than £1.2m is needed to sort issues that the NHS defines as ‘high-risk’, which could cause serious injuries to patients, major disruption to services or ‘catastrophic failure’.

This includes £503,000 worth of repairs at St Mary’s Community Health Campus, £246,000 at St James’ Hospital, both in Milton, and £179,000 at Jubilee House in Cosham.

Around £161,000 needs to be spent on similar issues in other sites across the city.

Around £1.9m should have been spent on the next most serious class of repairs, which pose a significant risk to safety or delivery of services. These include work such as replacing a backup generator.

Routine maintenance will restart once the Covid-19 pandemic allows for a return of normal services, according to Mark Young, associate director of estates transformation at Solent NHS Trust.

He said: ‘We carefully and continually prioritise estates works to ensure all our buildings are safe for our patients and employees.

‘The Covid-19 pandemic has meant that our estates team has had to reduce planned maintenance, working differently to mobilise resources, people and buildings in that response.

‘Once the pandemic situation has eased, we will restart our routine maintenance programme, prioritising the most urgent works first.’

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More than £1.4m is needed to address high risk issues at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, run by Southern Health NHS Trust.

Andrew Mosley, associate director of estate services said: ‘The trust is constantly undertaking maintenance to ensure the safety of our patients and staff.

‘The total relates to a range of things in the hospital including those that are coming to the end of their life cycle that we would update periodically as a precautionary measure.

‘Whilst Covid has made some aspects of this harder, the safety of patients and staff is paramount and any work needed to be done has been.’

Queen Alexandra Hospital has no backlog at present, according to a spokeswoman from Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said the £9bn nationwide maintenance backlog is almost equivalent to the annual running cost of the entire NHS estate.

He added: ‘Unfortunately it is patients and service users who are paying the price for this backlog.’

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said the government is investing ‘record sums’ to upgrade NHS buildings, with £600m to be spent on 1,800 urgent maintenance projects.

Solent NHS Trust has been awarded £616,000 from this central government funding.

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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