It has finally been agreed that the ownership of Savernake Hospital is to be transferred to Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (GWH). Savernake is currently owned by NHS Wiltshire, the Primary care Trust for Wiltshire which will disappear on 31 March.
NHS Wiltshire’s commissioning of health care will then pass to the new Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), but the Group is not allowed to own properties. The delay in the decision on the future ownership of Savernake Hospital was caused by its Private Finance Initiative (PFI) annual debt repayments – which next year will reach about one million pounds.
Savernake Hospital is now mainly used by GWH and they have a community health team based there. GWH told Marlborough News Online that they will be pleased to be taking responsibility for this hospital:
“We’re deeply committed to investing in and developing our community services. The trust has always expressed a willingness to take on responsibility for the Savernake Hospital building when NHS Wiltshire is dissolved at the end of the month. Now that Monitor’s position has been made clear, a formal decision by the Trust Board will now be made at its next meeting at the end of this month.”
“As a local organisation responsible for delivering community services across the whole of Wiltshire, we feel well placed to respond to the needs of the people of Marlborough and the surrounding towns and that is why we were keen to explore the possibility of ownership of the building transferring to the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.”
They have been improving the facilities there – notably with extra beds and the mobile chemotherapy unit: “We’re deeply committed to investing in and developing our community services.”
With such a large PFI debt, the transfer to GWH had to be signed off by Monitor – the body that ensures NHS foundation trusts are ‘well governed and financially robust’ – because the transfer was thought to be large enough to ‘materially impact’ on GWH’s financial position.
Today (March 15), just sixteen days before the deadline and with assurances from GWH that “it has taken all possible steps to mitigate any financial risk from this transaction”, Monitor has allowed the transfer to go ahead.
To take over Savernake Hospital GWH will have to extend its long-term borrowing capacity. So there was a sting in the tail to Monitor’s agreement: “However, we have told [GWH] that if it fails to address the identified risks, and runs into serious financial trouble in future, Monitor would take this into account when deciding what regulatory action if any, it is required to take.”
Joan Davies, Chairman of Savernake Parish Council who has been involved with the hospital for forty years and with the Friends of Savernake Hospital, has been waiting patiently for a decision on its future ownership: “I’m absolutely delighted. We couldn’t have had a better decision.”
The decision comes almost exactly a year after Claire Perry MP asked the then health minister, Simon Burns, about the future ownership of Savernake Hospital. Mr Burns told Mrs Perry that no handovers would be signed off until ‘holding arrangements for PCT’s PFI schemes’ are resolved.
Val Compton, a long-term campaigner for Savernake Hospital, was also delighted about the transfer to GWH – describing it as ‘brilliant news’: “I feel this puts Savernake on a far safer footing than it has been for some considerable time and will sleep just that little bit easier in my bed tonight. Claire has managed to keep this problem constantly near the surface and I feel without this effort we could just have sunk without trace.”
It took a long time to reach a decision when it was clear the government’s ‘stability fund’ for PFI hospitals would not include PCT properties and the PFI would stand.
Savernake Hospital was largely re-built, extended and re-equipped between 2003 and 2005. Despite the sale of adjacent land for housing, the then PCT had to find nearly seven million pounds in PFI financing.
The PFI payment includes all maintenance and equipment replacement. The current owners of the PFI contract have just received planning permission to put high quality double glazing into the older Gilbert Scott designed part of the building and are now lagging and re-tiling the roof to reduce heating costs.
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