Patients put at risk from £1bn lack of repairs

MORE than £1 billion worth of urgent repairs need to be carried out across the NHS to prevent ‘catastrophic’ failures and risk to safety, figures show.

NHS trusts in England are sitting on a record-high backlog of almost £6billion of repairs or replacements on their buildings and equipment – £1billion of which are classed as ‘high-risk’ repairs.

This means they could cause ‘catastrophic failure, major disruption to clinical services or deficiencies in safety liable to cause serious injury and prosecution’ if not done immediately, says NHS Digital.

There were 17,900 incidents where patients were harmed or put at risk of harm as a result of infrastructure problems – an increase of 800 in a year, the data from April 2017-March 2018 shows.

Clinical services were delayed, cancelled or affected due to problems on 3,835 occasions – a rise of 1,500. Trusts spent a combined £404.5million on repairs last year.

Chaand Nagpaul, from the British Medical Association, said there was an ‘urgent’ need for capital funding to address the NHS’s ‘impoverished infrastructure’.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: ‘ Our longterm plan for the NHS will boost funding by £20.5 billion a year extra by 2023/24. We are also investing £3.9 billion into the NHS to help transform and modernise buildings and improve patient care in hospitals and communities.’