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TORY REASSURES ABOUT HEALTH CAMPUS |
 Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has thrown his support behind the much publicised Watford Health Campus Project.
It was during a recent visit to Watford General Hospital that Mr Lansley, MP for South Cam-bridgeshire, dispelled concerns that if the Con-servative Party were to be voted into Govern-ment next year, they would look to close the Wat-ford facility. The visit comes just weeks after MP for Hemel Hempstead, Mike Penning, revealed that the project would have to be reviewed and stated he would prefer a better site for access to residents in surrounding areas including his own constitu-ency and St Albans. However, despite admitting that Watford Gen-eral Hospital was run down, Mr Lansley stated that there were no plans to close the Vicarage Road facility, and that the Conservatives would look at how to take the proposed Health Campus forward. He said: “I‟ve been here before so am familiar with the physical circumstances that Watford General has to work with, and what I wanted to do was come and see what stage they‟re at and see what the plan looks like. “There are various uncertainties they have to work with, but what I wanted to do was ease the political uncertainty that goes with them making progress on this project.” One of the first things that Mr Lansley wanted to quash was the notion that the hospital could be closed or knocked down, stating that this was “simply wrong.” “This is a site that is amongst the worst in the country and it needs a rebuild. If you were to go to a Greenfield site you would not necessarily gain better access.” He did state, however, that the proposed plans for a £300million new hospital would have to be changed after the current Private Funding Ini-tiative (PFI) on the table would be replaced with a different source of funding. “In principle this is a project I support, but in practice, it requires three things - the public and general practitioners in West Hertfordshire to say that they support it, it requires the Trust as a whole to meet the conditions to be a foundation trust and it requires the outline business case clearly to be viable.” Asked what he would change if in charge of making the decisions, Mr Lansley said that he understood, in clinical terms, maternity was an area that needed investment in, while he stated that the car parking issue would also have to be dealt with. Asked whether the NHS would be in safe hands if the Conservatives were voted in, Mr Lansley said it was “certainly our intention”. “I‟ve been Shadow Secretary of State for six years now and you can see from my point of view it makes a big difference, and I hope it makes a difference to the people in the NHS as well.” |