A date has been set to decide the biggest planning application in Brighton since the Falmer Stadium.
The future of the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Eastern Road in Kemp Town will be decided on Friday 27 January.
Brighton and Hove City Council will hold a Special Planning Committee meeting at Hove Town Hall to back or block the £420 million scheme.
The proposal – by Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust – involves demolishing the original Barry Building which dates from the 1820s. The 19th century Jubilee Building would also be replaced.
The trust expects the scheme to take ten years to complete and is part of a project known as the 3Ts project. It involves turning the Royal Sussex into a regional centre of excellence.
Unusually the scheme will not be paid for through a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) arrangement. Earlier PFI-funded projects have been criticised for saddling hospitals with debts.
The Renal Unit was build with a PFI contract 6 years ago and regrettably there are areas in need of proper repairs because of the cheapness of what was installed – buffers/handrail thingies along the walls at waist height especially began falling apart almost immediately.
There are no places for patients to hang coats and bags whilst seeing the doctor or having blood taken, etc. due to bad design.
In one lavatory, in the outpatients area, sink taps were attached to flexible tubing instead of copper pipes and that created problems – since rectified and there are no hooks on which to hang a coat and bag whilst using the loo and/or organising a urine sample (!) – bad design.
Hopefully, if the Eastern Road replacement is funded in a better way it will mean that use of more durable workmanship and higher quality materials will be considered a no-brainer, along with attention to details like places to hang coats while attending clinics.
But it is a massive overdevelopment and I pity local residents their fate.
I suppose it’s stupid of me to think they have earmarked another 1,000 car parking spaces whilst expanding the hospital?
Is great if you live in town but if you’re an out of towner (and the catchment is huge) then attending/visiting the hospital is a nightmare.