Star comment: Fiasco puts NHS chiefs into focus
Few people will be entirely surprised that plans to build a new £27 million hospital in south Shropshire have been scrapped through a lack of funds.
But they have every right to feel baffled, infuriated, and frankly let down today over the way the botched project has been handled.
The Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust admits there are 'lessons to be learned' after pulling the plug on the flagship Ludlow project.
That must go down as one of the great understatements of the year.
Public meetings have been consistently packed. Vociferous arguments have been aired on both sides. And now, with the clock ticking down to the scheduled start of building works, the trust decides that it could spend money on upgrading the existing Ludlow hospital instead.
That hospital has been there all along. It hasn't just appeared as a magical second, cheaper option. The whole fiasco raises serious questions about the management of NHS services in Shropshire, and it is entirely right that an independent review should now be carried out into how the disastrous project has been managed.
And whoever chairs this investigation will have some serious, and fairly fundamental questions to ask.
For example, did health chiefs fail to notice until the 11th hour that their numbers didn't add up, and that there was a £1.1 million black hole, even though the hospital had been years in the planning, with blueprints approved by the NHS?
Or, worse still, had they known about the emerging funding problems for months, but decided not to make them public, preferring to string local people along until they could keep it quiet no longer?
It is vital that the taskforce set up to decide on the next move delivers swift actions, rather than words, and that the public quickly see meaningful changes coming from their decisions.
In the current financial climate, with pressure on front-line NHS staff, it was always going to be tough to justify a big-money investment in bricks and mortar. But these are the decisions we rely on the local health trust to make with due diligence, careful planning, and common sense.
If the public is to retain any level of trust in these people, they need to pull out all the stops, and prove that they operate a system of maximum transparency, efficiency, and – most importantly of all – honesty.
