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The Deputy Chief Minister has published an open letter on the Government's intentions for the new hospital in response to concerns raised by a local pressure group.
In the letter responding to Stephen Regal of the Friends of Our New Hospital group, Senator Lyndon Farnham outlines the process through which the Political Oversight Group and Our Hospital team have been developing plans.
Dear Mr Regal,
Thank you for your letter dated 11th March 2021 on behalf of the Friends of Our Hospital group.
Pictured: The new hospital is scheduled to be built at Overdale.
I fully appreciate that a project of this importance and complexity raises a range of questions and we warmly welcome public engagement, so I am pleased to provide answers to your queries.
This project gives us all a once in a generation opportunity to deliver an outstanding, fully integrated General Hospital for Jersey by the end of 2026, with 21st century healthcare facilities to serve the current community and future generations.
As I have previously mentioned, the Political Oversight Group and the wider Our Hospital team share your group’s objective: to secure ‘the best hospital and health care system that Jersey can afford to sustain’ – a fit-for-purpose, high quality and value for money facility that meets the needs of patients and staff.
The Our Hospital project team includes highly experienced engineers, architects, designers and project managers who share our vision and are fully committed to delivering an excellent new hospital for Jersey.
Their work is being guided by our clinicians and medical professionals to ensure we achieve the best standards of care for all islanders.
Since the start of the project, we have been openly communicating at every key milestone, publishing all completed work as soon as it has become available.
Statements and detailed propositions are available on the States Assembly website and there is an open public consultation process with which we would encourage all islanders to participate. The project team can be contacted directly via www.ourhospital.je
I am sure you will appreciate that this is a dynamic, evolving project moving at a good pace in order to meet the 2026 deadline to replace our current ageing hospital. It is therefore something of a ‘moving target.'
Notwithstanding the pace of the project, I want to ensure that all islanders have current, accurate information so I now turn to the specific questions raised in your letter:
Pictured: "It will be designed to include treatment here rather than off-island or to at least enable patients to come home sooner to be with family and friends."
We will have a comprehensive new hospital that is both a general hospital and an acute hospital, with a wider range of services than is currently available at our existing hospitals.
It will be larger, more modern and much higher quality, offering 67,000 square metres of space compared to the 40,000 square metres currently available. We are designing a hospital that will be flexible and therefore future- proofed for future generations of islanders.
Islanders will have better medical care as a result of the new hospital, as you would expect for a project of this magnitude. The overall bed provision will be significantly higher although direct comparisons are difficult as medical care is continually developing.
We are currently working on the basis of 267 short and medium-term beds and a further 169 designated as day case, ambulatory, therapy and urgent treatment and assessment.
We are planning for occupancy rates of 75% compared to up to 90% in a UK hospital, largely to mitigate for the fact that we are an island community with no easy access to other hospitals nearby.
The nearest hospital is always a plane or boat ride away so this will be very much a unique hospital designed specifically to meet the needs of our community.
It will be designed to include treatment here rather than off island or to at least enable patients to come home sooner to be with family and friends.
The new hospital will be able to accommodate the new Jersey Care Model or any other care models or healthcare schemes developed in future.
There has been a constant process of consultation with our medical staff and clinicians which has resulted in the Functional Brief, an outline schedule of services that will be delivered from our new hospital building.
It was approved in December 2020 and is available on www.gov.je/ourhospital but it is a continually evolving document as service needs change and develop in line with quality and modernisation programmes.
Jersey patients will have access to a growing range of medical services, with some delivered in a different, more modern way that promotes recovery and independence.
A number of services are already community facing and either do not fit into a centralised service model of care within an acute and general hospital (eg pain clinic and psychology and talking therapies) or the service users and clinicians do not wish to be co-located to the acute and secondary care facility.
These services are being provided at other sites, and there will be ongoing and extensive engagement with clinical experts to ensure we have the optimum services for our community.
Pictured: "The Political Oversight Group and the Council of Ministers agreed that People’s Park should not be progressed as the States had already discounted it during a debate in 2019."
Overdale was approved by the States Assembly on 17th November 2020 as the preferred site for a new hospital.
This was the culmination of a comprehensive and thorough site evaluation process that included a Citizen’s Panel and continual engagement with clinicians.
Previous attempts at delivering a new hospital have been criticised for not having enough input from medical staff or the public.
We followed a step-by-step sequential process, free of political input, eliminating unsuitable sites at each stage according to specific criteria.
In the initial phase of the selection process, islanders were asked to suggest potential sites and more than 80 options were proposed. A list of 17 sites were then taken forward.
After further consideration this was reduced to a shortlist of five. Two of these – Overdale and People’s Park – were the final options.
At this stage States Members on the Political Oversight Group and the Council of Ministers agreed that People’s Park should not be progressed as the States had already discounted it during a debate in 2019.
The comprehensive site evaluation report is available at www.gov.je/ourhospital
Pictured: "The project was awarded to a joint venture, a new Jersey company called ROK FCC. ROK, based in St. Helier, is the construction firm behind the building of the new Les Quennevais School, Jersey’s Police Headquarters and the redevelopment of College Gardens."
The Design and Delivery Partner was selected following a full and thorough procurement process. The opportunity was widely communicated on the Channel Islands tender portal and the Official Journal of the European Union.
The project was awarded to a joint venture, a new Jersey company called ROK FCC. ROK, based in St. Helier, is the construction firm behind the building of the new Les Quennevais School, Jersey’s Police Headquarters and the redevelopment of College Gardens.
They are working with Spanish firm FCC, who bring vast experience and expertise of building hospitals across Europe, including in Northern Ireland, Majorca and mainland Spain. The Madrid-based company is listed as one of the top 15 construction business in the world, operating in more than 25 countries.
We have said from the outset that this project must be clinically-led and in order to maintain that commitment, senior health colleagues visited three hospitals in Madrid that were built by FCC. Their modern and flexible designs precisely fit with the sort of hospital our clinicians want to see built in Jersey.
To have a local partner of such quality team up with a global developer of such calibre and experience reinforces our commitment to deliver the best possible hospital for Jersey.
This partnership means our local workforce can draw on the expertise and experience of FCC, who have an excellent track record in delivering hospitals and other functional public buildings, and ensures that our island economy gets the boost it needs as it emerges from covid-19.
The search for the delivery partner underwent several stages before a three-month assessment and negotiation process. Following the outbreak of covid-19, the tender submissions were revisited to stress-test the bidders' financial resilience and supply chains as part of an extensive (and external) due diligence exercise.
Pictured: Senator Lyndon Farnham denied there being any secrecy around the hospital project.
For a project so critically important to every islander, transparency is essential, and it is my earnest wish, and indeed a priority, to ensure all islanders have access to all of the relevant, accurate and factual information they require.
There is absolutely no secrecy surrounding the new hospital. In fact, it is essential for islanders to be well-informed about this exciting project. At all stages we have published finalised documents in full.
The site selection process and the Functional Brief are freely available, and we have provided Scrutiny with all the documents from the meetings of the Political Oversight Group as it has progressed.
Key documents will continue to be made available for islanders to consider and all islanders will be able to feedback on plans as part of the Planning consultation and are available at www.gov.je/ourhospital.
I concede that communication can always be better, particularly for such a complex project, and we are working to improve the availability of information through a wider range of channels and in different formats.
Pictured: "Consultation and engagement with all islanders is an essential and mandatory part of the planning process and is progressing well."
Politicians and professional specialists from the team have engaged with the Parish of St. Helier and the Parish of St. Brelade both formally and informally since the project commenced.
This will be ongoing and is an essential part of our communication as we progress towards the planning application.
We have also engaged with specific stakeholders, including the Jersey Bowls Club and the residents of the Overdale and Les Quennevais areas.
Consultation and engagement with all islanders is an essential and mandatory part of the planning process and is progressing well. We will continue to build our working relationship with the parishes as the project progresses.
The Design and Delivery Partner has been contracted to deliver the Pre-Construction Services Agreement. A breakdown of anticipated costs – including contingency and optimism bias - developed for the Strategic Outline Case were published as part of P.123/2020: ‘Our Hospital Site Selection: Overdale’.
Any delays due to unforeseen circumstances will have financial implications for the project. There is no contingency built in for the considerable ongoing capital and maintenance costs of the existing health estate should the Our Hospital Project be delayed.
To finish, I would like to reiterate the strategic importance of this project for Jersey’s future. It is an unfortunate fact that any delay, regardless of the reason for it, will cost all taxpayers c£100k per day and would inevitably impact islanders’ health outcomes.
I am therefore grateful for your engagement and questions on behalf of members of the Friends of Our Hospital group and hope you will agree that we should move forward together as swiftly as possible for the benefit of all islanders.
Yours sincerely,
Senator Lyndon Farnham
