A once-in-a-generation capital investment in NHS services on the Isle of Wight, which includes a £23.7million upgrade of St Mary’s Hospital, is about to get underway.
Work to improve patient care and outcomes, reduce waiting times and bed occupancy and transform community mental health provision on the Island will start in November.
Funding for building plans drawn up as part of the Trust’s Investing in Our Future (IOF) programme has been approved by the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England. This funding will bring the total capital investment to the Island’s NHS to £75million over 4 years.
At St Mary’s, the Isle of Wight’s only remaining hospital, a new Emergency Care Floor will be created, plus wards will be reconfigured and a new High Dependency Unit will be delivered to improve the flow of patients through the hospital and improve the patient experience.
Furthermore, a new £6.7million mental health and community hub will be built at the former HMV premises in Newport High Street, bringing health and care services together with the community and voluntary sectors, much closer to people’s homes.
These building projects follow a £10million investment in additional beds at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, ensuring that any Islander who needs inpatient care on the mainland can access it – although the hospital is struggling itself with a critical incident declared this week due to a lack of beds.
Dr Nikki Turner, Acting Chief Executive of the Isle of Wight NHS Trust, has said:
“This is great news for our NHS and our community. Investment on this scale means that we can make a real difference to the way services are provided now and lay strong foundations for the future of health and care on the Isle of Wight.”
Health Minister Lord Markham said:
“Improving care for patients is one our top priorities and this funding will transform NHS services for thousands of local residents on the Isle of Wight.
“Creating a new mental health and community hub in Newport and modernising St Mary’s Hospital means patients can benefit from state of the art new facilities and more convenient care closer to home.
“This will help us bust the Covid backlogs and speed up treatment and diagnoses times.”
The Island’s NHS is also set to welcome further investment after the UK Government announced 1 of the 10 new Community Diagnostic Centres (CDC) will be built on the St Mary’s site. The centre will mean greater access to diagnostic tests for Islanders, reducing waiting times and improving outcomes.
Island MP, Bob Seely has said:
“I am delighted to see the money we campaigned for has arrived and building work can start. This will result in improvements in a range of services that will benefit Islanders for years to come. I would like to thank everyone on the Island who worked on this bid, including the former Chief Executive of the IW NHS Trust Maggie Oldham. It was a pleasure to support the project and to make sure Ministers understood its importance to the Island.”
And yet nothing will change with regard to patient care, just wait and see.
No it won’t because the problem is lack of staff.
The vacancy rate in the SE region is 6.2% for medical staff (doctors) and 12.4% for nursing. Let that sink in for a moment. 1 in 15 hospital doctor posts, 1 in 7 nursing posts (and 1 in 5 GP posts) are unfilled. The Isle of Wight is anecdotally worse, though there are no official figures for the IW Trust.
Nursing pay and conditions, not to mention morale, are at an all time low. Staff are leaving the profession in droves and they build more infrastructure without tacking the massive elephant in the room. Which wards will have to lose nursing staff to fill the new posts this building work will create?
While I agree with most of what you say those that are leaving the proffession strangely appear back the following week as agency nurses and doctors on more money,,the answer is not always about money, its about far more money for non hospital treatment, because hospital admissions are in my experience more about where non hospital treatments have failed or insufficent to solve the issue, I know that is a generalisation but I have personal experience of this amongst my family.
I agree generally with what you say but disagree about pay. Most nursing staff will be on a lot more than minimum wage, unlike many island workers. And the NHS should be training more of our own population rather than constantly going abroad for their staff.
Investment should be in equipment to enable patients to be treated here on the Island, instead of the added cost of being shipped across to the mainland.
It’s not the equipment, its the lack of staff. Specialist equipment needs specialist staff.
There is no point in installing expensive equipment if there are not enough staff to operate it.
This is what 12 years of the Tories devaluing medicine and nursing in the NHS as careers gets you.
I see the nice new front of hospital but money should be used for equipment and staff. Nice contract for builder.
They need to update the IT system which is out of date and means that important information is not always easily available.
Won’t change their overwhelmed status.
Waste of money if not spent wisely.
You lot all moan about anything! This is a positive move for the Island’s NHS.
I for one will always be eternally grateful to the NHS and applaud anything that helps it.
How can it be so expensive to do up the old HMV store? Seems a lot of money, but I expect a lot will be wasted on meetings and consultants before any building work is done. Need to buy a radiotherapy machine for the Island, have you tried to travel to Southampton and now worse to Portsmouth when you are ill?
I had to travel to Portsmouth for my cancer surgery, including the pre-op assessment. When I asked them why the pre-op assessment couldn’t be done here their response was “we wouldn’t trust them to interpret the results correctly”. Doesn’t exactly instill any confidence in St Mary’s.
Cancer care a mess at St Marys, witnessed it with my mother myself.
Sadly many island employees are not the brightest bunch.
Spend the money on a another hospital,that is what is needed
23 million my god yet car park fees going up and departments closing down and more and more having to go to Southampton for treatment, absolutely bloody ridiculous
So I thought the NHS was under funded so where is the money coming from the non public sector taxes as usual again
This is good for St Mary’s, any investment that comes to the island is. BUT, it’s not just money that is needed, it’s feet on the ground, shoes on the wards to be more precise. Throw millions of pounds to hospitals but what is really needed are more fully qualified Doctors and Nurses. So many left this profession because of the hours they were expected to work and of course, poor pay and working conditions. This is what needs to be fixed along with the Care sector. Money is not always the answer! I have little faith in the Tory Government to fix this problem.
When I trained we did most of our training on the wards. We we also had in between wards time in the school of nursing to prepare for the next placement. We also got paid a wage. You were never short of staff as you could have four students at a time working shifts alongside the ward staff.
Nice picture someone has drawn , but missed the third floor
And there will still never be enough beds the psychiatric department will remain an insult and a joke to anyone with mental health issues and continue to fob them off with half assed assessments and tell them there is nothing wrong with them so they have to go get a private diagnosis from a private shrink at enormous cost only to find the NHS don’t recognise a private diagnosis so people with mental health issues will continue to only get the help and support they need once it gets them into trouble with the law and all so pen pushing NHS managers who don’t even have the medical knowledge to apply a Band aid can have their over inflated salaries and bonuses instead of spending NHS funding on the patients who it’s ment for