Transforming our hospitals
About the hospital redevelopment programme
Herts Valleys CCG is working alongside West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust (WHHT) on a redevelopment programme to update and replace hospital buildings owned by the trust.
The redevelopment also links in with our Your Care, Your Future plans to transform how healthcare is provided for local people. This is also set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.
It was announced in September 2019 that the trust would receive government finance to help redevelop hospital buildings and facilities. The needs of the local population are changing and greater integration of services and use of digital technology is a priority in delivering better care to patients.
The hospital trust, with oversight from Herts Valleys CCG, is developing the Outline Business Case (OBC) which is the next stage in the regulatory approval process. As part of this the trust will:
- establish the option which optimises value for money
- demonstrate that the proposed scheme is deliverable
Your Care, Your Views
West Herts Hospitals NHS Trust has published plans for a transformational redesign of services across its three hospital sites and is seeking people’s views.
The Your Care, Your Views engagement programme, which is being supported by Herts Valleys CCG, invites feedback on the vision for the hospital trust’s sites and services. The trust is proposing to transform the site and buildings at Watford General Hospital (with up to 90% new buildings) and to refurbish Hemel Hempstead Hospital and St Albans City Hospital.
Creating a distinct role for each hospital site is at the heart of the plans and the broad outline for each hospital is as follows.
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Watford General Hospital – emergency, specialist and complex care
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St Albans City Hospital – planned surgical care and cancer services
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Hemel Hempstead Hospital – urgent and planned medical care, long term conditions.
Each hospital has an equally important part to play in providing a comprehensive range of excellent hospital care for people in west Hertfordshire. The proposal, which as had extensive input from clinical staff and has been developed to make practical sense, is to co-locate services that work well together and minimise duplication across our sites where possible.
Feedback from the engagement will help to inform a final decision on the preferred approach by this summer. This will also be informed by designs, costs and building timescales. Once agreed locally the proposal will be submitted for approval from NHS England and the government (the Department of Health and Social Care and Her Majesty’s Treasury). The trust expects to hear by the end of 2021 or early 2022 if funding for the redevelopment has been approved. It is possible that the impact of the current pandemic may lead to movement in some of these timescales.
Plans can then progress to developing a full business case.
Go to the Your Care, Your Views section of the WHHT website for more information about the plans and to see the the various ways of getting involved with the engagement, including completing a survey. This initial stage of the engagement ends on 24 March 2021.
Running alongside the engagement work outlined in Your Care, Your Views, architects BDP will be inviting members of the local community to have their say on the design and access proposals which are being created as part of the planning application process.
Find out more about the hospital redevelopment work on the West Herts Hospitals Trust website
Timeline to get to this point
2015 to 2016 - Your Care, Your Future
Widespread public engagement on the future of healthcare provision in West Hertfordshire, led by Herts Valleys CCG, leading to the development of a Your Care, Your Future vision. The vision is for more preventative, proactive and integrated care provided as close to home as possible with more options for patients to be seen by specialists in the community rather than needing to go to hospital. This identified that a further piece of work was required to review options for developing future hospital provision and develop a strategic outline case on a way forward. Visit our Your Care, Your Future section for more information.
2016 to 2017 - Development of strategic outline case.
During 2016 West Herts Hospitals Trust and the CCG carried out a wide-ranging review of various options for future hospital redevelopment. Options ranged from building a new hospital on a new site to varying degrees of redevelopment or refurbishment on existing sites. The process included financial and technical analysis and also public and stakeholder engagement. This concluded that redeveloping existing sites would be quicker, more affordable and more deliverable than a new hospital on a greenfield site.
In 2017 a strategic outline case that proposed significant redevelopment of Watford General Hospital as the main A&E hospital providing emergency, critical and planned care and redevelopment of St Albans City Hospital for planned care was approved separately by the WHHT and CCG boards. The hospital trust submitted the strategic outline case to regulators in autumn 2017. Link to the 2017 strategic outline case.
Find out more about the 2016 review of options here
Alongside this, during 2017 and 2018 the CCG worked with local clinicians, patients, councils and the community to develop complementary plans for new hospital facilities within Hemel Hempstead that could provide urgent, diagnostic and outpatient care.
2018 to 2019 - Refresh of strategic outline case
Autumn 2018: NHS Improvement and NHS England fed back on the strategic outline case. They agreed that investment was needed because of the condition of the buildings. However, they said that the amount of capital investment requested by the trust was too high and asked for the SOC to be 'refreshed'.
In response this feedback from regulators WHHT and the CCG led a process to refresh the strategic outline case which also incorporated consideration of Hemel Hempstead. This was launched with a series of public meetings during October and November in each of the four localities in west Hertfordshire. These meetings were well attended, reaching around 200 residents.
Presentation and questions and answers from the autumn 2018 meetings
January 2019: NHS Improvement wrote to the WHHT and the CCG clarifying that the hospital plans should be drawn up using the hospital trust’s annual turnover as a maximum threshold for any future investment. This figure is in the region of £350million.
On 29 January a second public event took place. This shared details of how the options for hospital redevelopment were shaping up in view of the NHSI guidance and explained the process for evaluating and shortlisting options.
Presentation and questions and answers from the January 2019 meeting
February 2019: West Herts Hospitals Trust and the CCG convened a stakeholder evaluation panel to examine the options under consideration from various aspects including patient care, accessibility and how they complement other parts of the health and care system locally. This panel had an advisory rather than a decision making role. To represent a range of stakeholder views this panel was made up of clinicians and managers from WHHT, the CCG, other NHS and partner organisations and seven patient and public representatives from across the four west Hertfordshire localities.
You can download the slides from the February panel meeting here and the extra information pack for the hospital options evaluation panel here.
Detailed information was gathered to support the evaluation process and this was also shared with the stakeholder evaluation panel. Follow the links below for further details:
- Demand and capacity information and analysis
- Population, catchment area and travel analysis
- Site options review
- HM Treasury guidance on how to appraise and evaluate policies, projects and programmes
During February scheduled 'private' meetings of the CCG and hospital trust boards each received an update on the investment threshold highlighted in the NHSI letter. The boards each confirmed a shortlist that took account of the funding threshold.
March 2019: A third public meeting (on 7 March) shared details of the shortlisted options confirmed by the hospital trust and the CCG boards. It invited people to comment on the shortlisted options in advance of these being examined at the second evaluation panel meeting.
Presentation from the March 2019 meeting
On 13 March the stakeholder evaluation panel met for a second time and scored the shortlisted options. The Read the slide pack from the March evaluation panel here.
May 2019: The third and final stakeholder evaluation panel meeting received a summary of the outcomes of the economic appraisal alongside the outcomes of the panel's scoring of qualitative scoring for each of the shorlisted options. Read the slide pack from the May evaluation panel here. This also details the key features of the shortlisted options.
During scheduled meetings 'in public' the boards of the CCG and hospital trust again discussed and agreed the shortlist, so allowing the public to be party to this decision.
June 2019: The boards of West Herts Hospitals NHS Trust and the CCG met together on 6 June 2019 to discuss four shortlisted options for hospital redevelopment and to reach a consensus on the emerging preferred way forward for securing major investment in local hospital facilities. Link to board papers for this meeting.
View the board presentation showing indicative plans for each of the four shorlisted options
The boards provided indicative support for the option to retain and redevelop all three existing hospital sites in Watford, St Albans and Hemel Hempstead. Features are as follows:
- Greatest amount of investment at Watford General Hospital with new clinical buildings housing theatres and critical care as well as women and children’s services and a refurbishment of the Princess Michael of Kent building, allowing significant improvement to inpatient ward accommodation.
- St Albans City Hospital to be enhanced as a planned surgical facility including a new cancer and surgical centre with diagnostic suite as well as refurbishments to theatres and inpatient beds and the development of a small high dependency unit.
- Hemel Hempstead Hospital to become a planned medical centre with services, including a newly provided urgent treatment centre, consolidated into redeveloped premises.
June 2019: A public meeting on 13 June updated people on the results of the stakeholder and financial evaluation of the options and on the emerging preferred option that came out of the meeting of the hospital trust and CCG boards.
Presentation from the June 2019 meeting
We filmed the 13 June event in response to requests from people who were not able to attend.
View the event on our YouTube channel here
July 2019: On 11 July the hospital trust board met and approved the strategic outline case detailing a way forward based on option one. The Herts Valleys Clinical Commissioning Group board met later the same day to consider the proposed way forward. The board endorsed the trust board’s decision.Read the papers for the CCG board.
Read the strategic outline case
Read the report of public and stakeholder engagement for the strategic outline case
At the end of July 2019 the SOC was submitted to NHS regulators and central government for consideration.
Answers to frequently asked questions
Throughout the hospital redevelopment project we have been answering questions put to us by members of the public and have collated these into a document so that they are available for everyone.