THE Scottish Government is “pausing” the planned replacement for Monklands hospital, with Health Secretary Angela Constance insisting the proposed new hospital is “significantly more expensive” than other projects.
She told MSPs going ahead with the £2.1 billion replacement for the Airdrie hospital would “significantly limit” investment in the rest of the NHS.
She insisted however that ministers are “fully committed” to building a new hospital.
But Scottish Labour health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie said “the people of Lanarkshire and the hardworking NHS staff will be bitterly disappointed with this announcement”.
“This is not a reset – it’s a complete halt,” she added.
Constance however stated: “We will build a new Monklands Hospital.”
She added this would be done “as part of a wider transformation of care across Lanarkshire and the west of Scotland”.
But announcing the “formal reset” of the project she told MSPs: “This is a reset and not a stop. This will involve pausing progression of the current design and commissioning a comprehensive redesign.”
That redesign work will “move at pace”, Constance said, adding that revised options for the new hospital should be ready by the middle of next year.
The Health Secretary added that it was the “ambition” for construction work to start in 2028, with “demonstratable progress” to be made on the project over the five years of the current Holyrood term.
Announcing the decision at Holyrood, Constance told MSPs: “This is a difficult decision, but it is the right one. ”
As well as the cost of the current Monklands replacement project – which is more than the cost of building the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow – she said that building another large acute hospital was “not the direction in which our health service is moving”, with the focus being on providing care closer to patients’ homes.
She insisted however it was a “reset and not a stop” on the Monklands replacement project.
She said that the present building has “infrastructure risks” and that ministers would invest to tackle these.
The Health Secretary also said taking a “different approach” would allow ministers to invest more broadly in community health hubs – with the first phase of these planned for Port Glasgow, Cowdenbeath and Lochgelly, and East Calder, and further such centres for in the pipeline for Hamilton, Cumbernauld, Edinburgh, Ayr, Kincardine, Inverness, East Dunbartonshire and Glasgow.
The Government will also establish a walk in GP clinic in Lanark, as well as the one already planned for Shotts.
Scottish Conservative health spokesman Miles Briggs said the decision showed that “the SNP are incapable of delivering any infrastructure project on time or on budget” including a hospital in former health secretary Neil Gray’s constituency.
Briggs added: “Sticking plaster policies like GP walk-in centres and community health hubs just won’t cut it.
“John Swinney must come clean on when the new Monklands Hospital will be delivered and how much it will cost the taxpayer.”
Local SNP MSP Fulton Macgregor meanwhile admitted he could not say that “he was happy with today’s announcement”.
The Coatbridge and Chryston MSP said: “As the Health Secretary will be aware, Monklands Hospital urgently needs (to be) replaced, and there have been various concerns raised about the aging infrastructure, water contamination, and asbestos.
“The people of Monklands and wider Lanarkshire have been promised a new hospital for some time, and it’s been long documented to the road that has led us to here today.
“So, I don’t fully understand how we have arrived to where we have today.”
