A new state-of-the-art Airedale General Hospital

We were delighted to be accepted on to the New Hospital Programme on 25 May 2023, following the Trust’s bid to develop a new hospital for Airedale to replace our current hospital which has reached the end of its life.

A state-of-the-art, cleaner greener hospital that’s fit for the future

We are in a great position to be able to build a new hospital on our existing 43-acre site providing a state-of-the-art hospital that our patients, staff and community deserves.

Our new hospital will help us to be ahead of the curve, and to meet the demands of our growing and ageing population. It will provide a safer, modern environment that’s fit for the future to enhance patient care and experience.

Building a new hospital will allow us to fully eradicate the RAAC. It will also give us the opportunity to design and build a hospital that is more sustainable, helping to achieve the NHS ambition of achieving zero net carbon emissions by 2040.

Our new hospital won’t function in isolation: it will allow us to unlock the potential of a truly integrated health system, not only with our own community services but with our health and care partners across Bradford District and Craven.

New Hospital Programme Next Steps

 Following the announcement from the Secretary of State Steve Barclay on Thursday 25 May that Airedale Hospital has been added to the New Hospital Programme, we wanted to let you know more about our next steps.

We are of course eager to start work on the new hospital as soon as possible, but building a new hospital takes time and it will take a number of years to go through the necessary planning and approvals process to build the new hospital.

At the moment we are embarking on the very first steps of our journey, and are at the earliest stages of planning. We are working with ‘master planning’ experts to determine the size and scale of the new hospital, based on our growing population and their predicted future need for NHS services.

This work will help determine where the hospital may be built, how big it needs to be and what enabling works are needed.

After this we will start a programme of work to look at planning the scheme. It is important that we get this right, so it will take us a little while to get to a stage where we have a full plan.

Feedback from colleagues, patients, service users and local communities is a really important part of our planning work, and there will be plenty of opportunities for people to share their views and speak to us about what is important to them.

This is a really exciting once in a lifetime opportunity to be involved in developing our new hospital, and ensure that the hospital and grounds are designed to meet future needs.

We have recently installed a temporary ‘deck’ car park on the staff car park, as part of our initial enabling works, with some longer-term plans for travel and parking being developed to help the issues we face with parking at the hospital. 

More information about our plans for the new hospital and how you can provide feedback will be shared as soon as we have this available.