Wycombe Hospital approaching end of life - NHS trust

Scaffolding and green netting has been put up on the main Wycombe Hospital building on Queen Alexandra Road

A hospital is "approaching its end of life" and is in "dire need of replacement", an NHS trust said.

Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust (BHT) said Wycombe Hospital was "safe", but ongoing repairs and maintenance costed about £2m a year.

Chief executive, Neil Macdonald, said they were still hopeful of finding £200m for a purpose-built planned care centre on the site.

"There are other options available to us," he said.

An investigation into the structural integrity of the hospital began in April 2022 and scaffolding and green netting was put up on the main building on Queen Alexandra Road while the process took place.

More than a year on, Mr Macdonald said the tower was "perfectly safe", but the trust needed £80m to fix its critical infrastructure - although it still would not have a building that met modern-day healthcare needs.

"The scaffolding allows access to the top floors where we are doing continuous maintenance, surveying and repairs on the building," he said.

"Bits are not falling off it, but we have to continually check and make sure everything is as it should be and if necessary we replace parts."

Care centre

He added that the 1961-built building had small, narrow wards, poor ventilation and increasing vulnerability to water damage.

"It's approaching its end of life and is in dire need of replacement," he said.

"It costs about £2m per year just to keep the scaffolding up [and] to employ the contractors.

"I would rather be spending taxpayers money not on a building that's not going to be there for a very long time, [but] actually investing that in new, modern 21st Century healthcare facilities."

The trust said it needed up to £200m to build a purpose-built planned care centre on the site, but without additional funding it could not afford either to fix the tower or create the new centre.

He said it was "really disappointing" to miss out on recent government funding, but would continue to seek the urgent investment the hospital needed.

"There are other options available to us in terms of different ways we might find some of that money or perhaps break the project down into smaller chunks," he said.

"We are ready to go... and we could be quite nimble with some smaller pots of money."

The Department of Health and Social Care said it was prioritising five other hospitals outside of the region that were "in pressing need of repair".

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