£99.3m needed for the backlog of repairs for our hospitals

NEARLY £100 million is needed to repair hospital buildings across Leicestershire - with the cost of tackling potentially life-threatening issues rocketing over the past five years.

The pandemic has potentially delayed repair work, with funding diverted to increase Covid care capacity.

In 2019/20, the most recent published figures, the estimated cost to clear the maintenance backlog at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust was £99.3 million.

That was up 12 per cent in a year, from £88.6 million in 2018/19, according to the figures published by NHS Digital.

The cost of tackling the most serious maintenance issue has risen even faster. The trust identified £24.7 million worth of work needed to tackle their “high risk” maintenance backlog in 2019/20.

These are defined as repairs and replacements that must be addressed as an urgent priority in order to prevent catastrophic failure, major disruption to clinical services, or deficiencies in safety liable to cause serious injury or prosecution.

The amount needed was up from £19 million in 2018/19, with the amount rising rapidly from £840,062 in 2015/16.

Leicester Royal Infirmary had an estimated £11.5 million backlog in 2019/20, up from £9.2 million the year before.

Glenfield Hospital had a £6.8 million high risk backlog in 2019/20, with £6.4 million needed at the General.

The trust cited the maintenance backlog at its sites in its consultations on plans to build new facilities, saying some of the hospital buildings are old, tired and beyond their useful life.

It added: “There are only a few facilities we can call state-of-the art and there is a backlog in repairs to the buildings, resulting in poorer conditions and buildings being no longer fit-for-purpose.”

Across England, in 2019/20, the estimated cost to clear the maintenance backlog across the NHS as a whole was £9 billion.

Health think tank The Nuffield Trust said that was equivalent to the total annual cost of running all accident and emergency departments, ambulance services and critical care services combined.

The cost of clearing the backlog also rose by more than a third in a year, from £6.5 billion in 2018/19.

The cost of tackling the most serious maintenance issue jumped by almost half a billion in the same period.

Trusts identified £1.5 billion worth of work needed to tackle their “high risk” maintenance backlog in 2019/20. The amount needed was up from £1.1 billion in 2018/19, and £775.5 million in 2015/16.

The maintenance backlog also has the potential to make recovery from the pandemic - which has seen waiting times for treatment grow - more difficult.

A number of hospital trusts are having to put in place safety measures due to potential issues with reinforced concrete planks used in their construction between the 1960s and 1980s, which have a 30-year lifespan.

North West Anglia NHS Trust’s most recent annual plan warned of a significant risk to the recovery plan for elective treatment due to the poor condition of the main theatres at the Hinchingbrooke Hospital.

As reported in the Guardian, that includes issues affecting the load bearing of the floor, restricting the use of some theatres to patients under 120kg, with a need to close two theatres for months to carry out surveys.

James Devine, programme director of acute care at the NHS Confederation, said: “Maintenance backlogs will vary, regionally and from trust to trust. Some will be high risk, which includes issues such as potential roof collapses because of the age of buildings, while others will need more minor estate upgrades, and others will be about general regular maintenance requirements of buildings, such as flooring.

“The NHS has been doing all it can to address maintenance issues, but inevitably, Covid has delayed tackling ma i ntenance backlog work, just as it has delayed addressing treatment backlogs. “There are two main reasons – one is that where hospitals were caring for Covid patients, workers could not have gone into those areas to carry out any maintenance or repairs, and the other is that capital funding will have been diverted to deal with Covid-related issues, such as rapid capacity increases.”

The Department of Health and Social Care has said the government recognises the urgent need to modernise many NHS buildings and has opened a selection process to identify a further eight potential new hospitals, with initial applications due this month.

There is a backlog in repairs to the buildings, resulting in poorer conditions and buildings being no longer fit-forpurpose

NHS Trust