Following the announcement from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Steve Barclay MP, 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 delighted to have been added to the programme and 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 establish 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.
In the meantime, we intend to install a temporary ‘deck’ car park on the staff car park during the summer, pending planning permission, 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.
