A HUGE new hospital has opened its doors for a sneak-peak look as it prepares to open officially after years of delays.
Midland Metropolitan University Hospital in Smethwick will finally open to the public on October 6 – six years after it was originally due to open.
The new hospital has more than 730 beds, a new emergency department and dedicated children’s A&E, more than a dozen operating theatres and a new maternity unit.
The ‘super hospital’ was expected to open in October 2019 and cost around £350m but has been hampered by several delays and rising costs. The cost of building the hospital has now risen to at least £750m – with running costs expected to push the total cost to nearly £1bn.
The hospital’s managing director Rachel Barlow revealed the cost of building the hospital was £750m and staff recruitment ahead of next month’s opening was “going well.”
“It has been a long time in the process but I’m sure you can see what an amazing facility this is,” she said. “It will bring benefits to our patients immediately.
“This hospital brings two hospitals onto one site. That brings two clinical teams and all our services onto one site and gives patients equity of care. The design of the hospital facilitates quicker diagnostics and treatment.”
The opening of the new hospital will see services and staff moved from City Hospital in Dudley Road and Sandwell General Hospital in West Bromwich to the enormous multi-million-pound building at Grove Lane.
The two existing sites will be used for most outpatient, day case and diagnostic treatments with Sandwell General Hospital in West Bromwich becoming an urgent treatment centre and Birmingham Treatment Centre and Birmingham and Midland Eye Centre remaining at the Dudley Road site.
During the tour of the hospital, Michael Brennan, the new hospital’s A&E matron, said understandably sceptical staff were now looking forward to the move having been given a tour of their new workplace. “The honest truth is that everyone was a bit pessimistic initially,” he admitted.
“We’ve had a number of delays over the last couple of years and we were still quite pessimistic up until a couple of months ago.
“What has really changed for staff now is getting on-site and seeing it. I think everyone was ‘not sure’ but then they’ve got here and think it is brilliant.
“We’re looking forward to it, and even a lot of the people who said ‘oh I don’t want to come’ are saying they are really looking forward to it.”
The new hospital includes a dedicated children’s A&E with maternity services moving from City Hospital.
Dr Nick Macwana, consultant paediatrician, said the new hospital would work wonders for the region’s young people and the department’s staff.
“We’ve got so much more space here and that makes a massive difference in delivering the care that we want to deliver,” he said.
“We are going to be able to bring kids in for outpatient. It’s going to be one space. At the moment we are spread across two sites and that makes it really difficult for us to try and keep those covered all the time. The fact that we are bringing both teams together will just be amazing for them.”
Work on the new Black Country ‘super’ hospital began in January 2016 and was expected to take 34 months to complete. The first of several delays pushed back the opening date by another year from October 2018 to later in 2019.
The original contractor Carillion, which was building the hospital went into administration, partly due to issues with the new PFI hospital contract, creating extra delays. Negotiations began over a new contractor with Swedish-based company Skanska saying the new hospital would need another £125m and would also be 18 months late. Months later, a new contractor had still not been confirmed and the unfinished – and deteriorating site – was not likely to open until at least 2022.
A consortium of banks funding the huge hospital project pulled out in June 2018 and the government cancelled the PFI contract for the hospital’s construction. In the meantime, NHS bosses awarded a £13m contract to Balfour Beatty to protect the building while a main contractor was sought to finish building the hospital.
The government announced in August 2018 that it would provide money to finish building the hospital after a long search for a new contractor returned fruitless. The region’s NHS trust was still having problems finding a new contractor in November of that year and the opening of the then half-finished hospital was pushed back beyond 2022.
Meanwhile, NHS boundary disputes, which could have seen Sandwell and West Birmingham split, threatened to add more delays to the lagging project. Bids from new, and long-involved contractors were invited in January 2019, with the work expected to start later that year and be finished by 2021. Balfour Beatty, reportedly the only company to bid for the work, was still awaiting approval in September. A £267m contract was then signed with work expected to start by the end of 2019 and be completed by summer 2022.
A report by the National Audit Office on the collapse of Carillion and its involvement in the hosptial in 2020, which was also much-delayed, revealed the cost of building and running the hospital for the first 30 years would reach nearly £1 billion. The audit blamed the now-defunct company for pricing jobs too low to meet specifications and warned that the cost would rise by more than 40 per cent and up to five years over deadline.
Shortages in construction jobs and materials forced the NHS trust to admit it would miss the 2022 deadline. A spring 2024 opening date was then missed before bosses pushed the date back again to autumn.
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