Plans for a new hospital in Hertfordshire offering planned and urgent services are being considered.
But the NHS Trust and Herts Valleys Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) insists that Watford General Hospital would remain the leading location for emergency care.
The Trust and CCG spent late October and early November holding meetings for residents across Hertfordshire, where they had the opportunity to hear about the latest plans and progress with developing hospital sites in west Hertfordshire.
A strategic outline case (SOC) was submitted to NHS regulators, NHS Improvement and NHS England last year, which stated that Watford General would be redeveloped but remain the location for emergency and specialised care, while St Albans City Hospital should be improved to support an increase in surgical procedures.
Helen Brown, acting chief executive at West Herts Hospitals Trust, admitted that the plans may have changed from last year.
She said: “We’re doing some further work to our strategic outline case to satisfy NHS Improvement and NHS England that our plans are solid.
“Things have moved on in the 12 months since we submitted our strategic outline case and in view of that we need to look again at some of our figures, both around patient numbers and finances. In particular we need to look at how we can make our plans as affordable as possible by looking at how we can do the development in phases.
“While we’re doing that additional work we’ll look at the feasibility of an alternative option that would bring planned care onto a single site. However, the proposal to develop planned care on the St Albans and Hemel Hempstead hospital sites as set out in the original SOC currently remains our preferred way forward.”
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