£35m repair backlog at West Lothian hospital branded 'damning indictment' of NHS management
.jpg?width=96&crop=1:1,smart)
St John’s Hospital in Livingston faces a £35 million maintenance backlog in a “damning indictment” of NHS management
A £35 million maintenance backlog at a West Lothian hospital has been branded a “damning indictment” of the Scottish Government's running of the NHS.
Freedom of information data has revealed more than 500 items requiring repair at St John’s Hospital in Livingston, with an estimated bill of £35.7 million.
More than £800,000 of the outstanding maintenance is considered “high-risk”, including the replacement of medical gas pipework in a ward housing a chemotherapy day unit.
The majority of the work – totalling more than £26 million – is categorised as “significant” or “moderate”.
Scottish Conservatives Health and Care spokesman Miles Briggs said: “These staggering costs for the maintenance backlog at St John’s Hospital alone are a damning indictment of the SNP’s mismanagement of our NHS over the last two decades.
“They have neglected local hospitals like this for too long and allowed them to fall into a terrible state.
“Failure to maintain the infrastructure of hospitals will be putting patients and staff at risk.
“NHS Lothian and SNP ministers must come clean on what they are doing to tackle this maintenance backlog and the impact these repairs will have on frontline care.”
Gregor Poynton, MP for Livingston called the backlog more evidence of the pressures facing local and national NHS “after years of SNP mismanagement”.
He added: “Patients and hardworking NHS staff are paying the price for chronic and ongoing failure to get to grips with the challenges facing our health service.
"The SNP's annual winter NHS crisis has become a year-round crisis, with record A&E waits, rising delayed discharge and growing pressure across the system, as well as huge maintenance backlogs.
"Patients and staff at St John's deserve better, and the people of Scotland deserve better. After nearly two decades in government, the SNP has run out of excuses and must finally take responsibility for its failures."
Reporting in 2022, the Evening News outlined how NHS Lothian’s maintenance backlog for its entire estate had doubled since the COVID-pandemic to £113,451,635.
It was reported then that St John’s faced a £3 million cost to replace windows. The most recent FOI shows that the bill is now close to £4 million.
The health board’s Backlog Maintenance Programme Board meets regularly to evaluate the risks associated with its maintenance programme. An independent internal audit by BDO in October, commissioned for the Audit and Risk Committee, said that NHS Lothian 'demonstrates good practices in managing its Facilities and Estates Operations”. However, it noted that reactive repairs ”are not consistently completed in a timely manner and NHSL are currently reliant on workers self reporting tasks as completed with no quality checks in place.”
Jim Crombie, Deputy Chief Executive of NHS Lothian, said: “Patient and colleague safety remains a key priority for us, which is why we have robust programmes of inspection, monitoring and maintenance in place at St John’s Hospital.
“The £35 million figure relates to identified backlog maintenance requirements within a large, complex acute hospital.
“A programme of backlog maintenance is undertaken each year, prioritised towards the areas of greatest need and risk. Around £1.5 million has been invested in backlog maintenance projects at St John’s over the past two years, with a further £1.25 million planned this year, together with additional investment through projects that run across multiple NHS Lothian sites.”
Mr Crombie added that more than £11 million of Scottish Government funding had been allocated to “major improvement projects” at St John’s – including work to replace the roof, costed at around £2.15 million, and to improve laundry infrastructure.
He added: “Backlog maintenance is a normal part of the life-cycle management of a hospital estate. It reflects our ongoing commitment to maintaining safe facilities and services for the patients and staff who visit and rely on St John’s.”
The Scottish National Party has been approached for comment