North Tees and Hartlepool health trust faces 'significant challenge' to make over £20m savings but leaders pledge to protect patients

NHS trust chiefs were told how the University Hospital of North Tees’ buildings had only eight years of life left in them, and could end up costing £300m to maintain.

They were previously labelled “not fit for purpose” with leaking roofs and windows, broken ceiling panels and freezing pipes.

And a £380m bid to build a new hospital was rejected by the government in May.

Stuart Irvine, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust’s director of strategy, assurance and compliance, said the main “red risks” to the trust’s goals were making savings and the trust’s ageing estate.

He said the savings target was £20.7m, with a “significant challenge” to balance budgets at the end of the year.

Workshops and meetings were taking place “with a view to identifying, scoping and costing all schemes that we’re able to take forward” in the current and future financial years, he told a trust directors’ board meeting.

Trust managing director Neil Atkinson said: “We absolutely recognise that the cost improvement programme is a difficult ask, but it’s not just this particular trust. This is across the board.

“It does make it very challenging. We have quality impact assessments here, so although we do need to save money… we would not put patient safety at risk, and we have mechanisms to ensure that we don’t do something that would ultimately be detrimental to patients.

“This is about coming out of Covid and getting back to business as usual and also that we have good processes.”

Mr Irvine said specialist external reviews and reports highlighted how the North Tees hospital site’s three main buildings of its tower block, north wing and south wing, have approximately eight years of useful economic life currently.

The cost of maintaining the three buildings was estimated to balloon to about £300m by 2031.

Mr Irvine said: “The estate represents a risk from a health and safety perspective, for example the condition of the building, and also from a financial perspective and the ability to secure capital funding.

“The trust was unsuccessful in securing capital funding from the national bid linked to the new hospital programme. The trust is now in the process of developing an outline business case for 2023-24 and exploring alternative funding opportunities.”

Mr Irvine said the trust has a large investment programme for this year of just under £20m.

He said: “On the £20m that we would normally spend, we probably spend the great majority of that on the buildings. This is Peterlee, Hartlepool, North Tees.

“We spend somewhere between £8m to £10m on our backlog maintenance to ensure the building is operationally effective and it is fit for purpose. Colleagues will have seen all of the scaffolding going up around the north wing.

“It is a huge amount of investment. I think the concern is that amount of money will increase each and every year, because the maintenance required on an old building will increase quite significantly over a relatively short period of time.”