Has BHRUT applied for £22M to progress the plan to close King George A&E?

Earlier today at the BHRUT board meeting the following was disclosed regarding a bid made last month by BHRUT to resubmit £25M of capital monies, including £6M of PFI funding.

To understand, what may be going on, it seems helpful to look at what happened at Stratford Town Hall on April 3rd where the following slide was presented.

 This suggests £22M if the funding is to for works for maternity and children's work at Queens.

The driver if this is the new plan to close KGH A&E at the estates strategy published last year per the extract below:

Current options for change

Queen’s Hospital Queen’s Hospital has one of the busiest and largest emergency departments in England, and so development at Queen’s will be focused on emergency and acute medicine, emergency surgery and acute children’s services. In addition, maternity facilities could also be expanded and developed to manage the continued growth in the number of births in north east London. To facilitate this development, the renal unit at Queens could be moved to the new St. George’s hub with non-acute care of older people, and some elective surgical services moved to King George Hospital. (my emphasis)

King George We aspire to develop a new centre of excellence for healthy ageing, working in collaboration with community care, primary care and social services to offer a fully integrated model of healthcare for older people. Centralising planned care will increase the use of beds and theatres. These changes, together with the adjacent Goodmayes Hospital site, create a strategic opportunity to develop a coherent masterplan for housing, education, community and primary health care, maximising land value across the two hospital sites. ENDs

That this monies are earmarked as I outline is speculation, but by BHRUT not providing detail of the bids, speculation is bound to be invited.

We need to know what is going on asap and I will ask what is going in at the Redbridge Clinical Commissioning Group tomorrow.

On the face of it, BHRUT is expanding services at Queens rather than King George without public consultation. Further expansion of acute care for maternity and children's services at Queens will make it easier for BHRUT to argue for the third part of their plan, the £49M bid to close King George A&E. 

More on this when I report back from the Redbridge Clinical Commissioning Group tomorrow.