I am delighted to share with you that the Government has confirmed that there are seven hospitals with RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) issues which are exempt from their review of the national new hospital programme. Frimley Park Hospital is one of those which means the new Frimley Park Hospital has been formally confirmed as sitting outside of the broader review and given the green light to continue to move forward as planned.

We are being actively supported by the national New Hospital Programme to maintain progress to ensure the new hospital will be open as soon as possible.

While we were always confident that our new hospital would remain a priority, we know the announcement of the review into the national new hospital programme raised questions and uncertainty, and so we welcome this additional clarity and renewed commitment. 

This is an exciting once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to transform the future of healthcare for our staff, patients and local communities, and we will continue to keep you informed and involved as our journey continues.

Caroline Hutton 

Deputy Chief Executive, Frimley Health  
Senior Responsible Officer for the New Frimley Park Hospital 

In parallel with the government review, we had been looking at our internal leadership and governance within our new hospital programme. 

• Our new CEO Lance McCarthy has now joined. Lance most recently served as Chief Executive at The Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, where he was instrumental in getting the hospital included in the New Hospitals Programme.  

• Caroline Hutton, Deputy Chief Executive of the Trust is now the Senior Responsible Officer for the programme.  

• We also now have our new programme director, Alex White, who brings with him over 20 years’ experience leading on major projects in the health sector, and comes from West Herts - another new hospital programme trust. 

Our new hospital programme governance is also being refreshed to include our partners from the Integrated Care Board (ICB), NHS England South East and the national new hospital programme to ensure better collaborative working.

This is a huge opportunity for us all to ensure that we are developing and aligning our clinical strategy and plans to transform our services not just within our acute hospitals but by bringing care closer to home via community settings or through virtual wards and appointments. We will be working together with our regional and ICB teams to ensure we are working closely with system partners on these plans.

The national new hospital programme team is overseeing and developing a range of tools and designs that we can use to build our new hospital. This includes: 

• Hospital 2.0 – this is a standardised design for future hospitals which will benefit patients and staff through digital solutions and an optimised hospital layout. It will decrease the time to develop and build hospitals as well as reduce the cost through economies of scale and modern methods of construction. 

• Demand and capacity modelling - this determines the size required for each new hospital based on expected demographic changes, expected disease burden changes, movement of patient care to different settings, impact of digital and more. It will establish the number of beds and other key service requirements needed for our new hospital.  

As this programme progresses, we’ll keep you informed through our website and this newsletter, and work with our community to ensure the new hospital meets everyone’s needs.

We are also collaborating closely with the national team and our partners to streamline essential processes and business cases, helping us meet our ambitious timeline. 

The need to remove all RAAC from Frimley Park Hospital is the driving force behind our timeline as it makes up around 65% of our hospital. While we develop and build our new Frimley Park Hospital, we will continue with our extensive RAAC maintenance programme to keep our hospital, patients, and staff safe. 

We know this work can be disruptive - leading to temporary facility changes and some inconvenience - but it’s all to ensure our hospital remains safe and secure for everyone.  

At Frimley Park, we continuously encourage our staff to stay vigilant for any signs of potential structural deterioration and to promptly report any issues to our estates and facilities team.

We’ve identified and reviewed a number of sites and have since narrowed these down based on our specific technical criteria and detailed due diligence work. This covers the categories below.

As we are in confidentiality agreements with land owners of our preferred sites, we cannot provide further information while we continue this critical due diligence.

We understand how important the site location is to our local community and staff, and we will share an update with you as soon as possible. 

More detail on the New Hospital Programme, including future events and engagement opportunities will be added to our website.

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