Health Minister Andrew Green and Infrastructure Minister Eddie Noel say in an open letter to the JEP that building the facility anywhere but St Helier ‘makes no sense at all’ and add that the ‘right approach’ is to allow the project team to press ahead with proposals to build on the current site.
The ministers also maintain that patients’ lives would be put at risk from longer ambulance travel times if the future hospital was built out of town and argue that a decision on the site should be based on ‘professional expertise’ rather than ‘personal opinions’.
Calls have been growing in recent weeks for the location of the new hospital to be rethought following Environment Minister Steve Luce’s decision to reject proposals for the facility to be built on the current plot and extending into Kensington Place, due to the scale and height of the project.
In the past two months alone the JEP has published more than 30 letters from readers commenting that there are other publicly owned sites on which it would be safer, quicker and cheaper to build the new hospital rather than the current location.
In a letter written in response to those comments, which can be read in full on page 12 of today’s newspaper, the ministers admit that there is ‘no such thing as a perfect location for the new hospital’, especially in an island as small as Jersey.
However, they stress that there has already been an ‘extensive site-selection process’ which examined 41 different locations before the current site was approved by the States in December 2016.
Explaining that a third of Islanders live in St Helier and another third live on the outskirts of town, the letter adds: ‘An out-of-town hospital would immediately be remote from the greatest concentration of the Island’s population, which makes no sense at all.
‘It would mean that a third of hospital users who currently walk would not be able to do so, and it would mean 200,000 visits by car or public transport, mostly from St Helier.’
The ministers say that Jersey’s roads outside St Helier ‘do not have the capacity’ for the extra car journeys and that many are ‘unsuitable for heavy or emergency traffic’.
‘Ambulance travel times would increase, especially from the west, and every minute’s delay in emergency response time risks a worse outcome for patients suffering from strokes or heart attacks,’ the letter says.
Senator Green and Deputy Noel also claim that the concerns raised by independent UK planning inspector Philip Staddon about the ‘overbearing’ size of the new hospital ‘would apply just as much – if not more – in a rural setting’.
Although Mr Staddon said that the issues surrounding the scale and height of the initial proposals could not be ‘finessed away by clever design’, he maintained that a rebuild on the current location was appropriate due to its transport links and because it was a well-established hospital site ‘which works well for the community’.
Last week, Senator Green told the JEP that the issues raised by Mr Staddon could potentially be resolved by constructing the hospital in two phases – with the first phase to build extending onto Kensington Place and the second phase building on land cleared following the transfer of services into the new facility.
