Why Lynn's Queen Elizabeth Hospital must make the new-build list

In the weekly In the Market column, editor Jeremy Ransome discusses the need for a new hospital in the town...

Just like most of you, I have a long relationship with Lynn’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital – it’s played a part in nearly all of my 52 years. Although I was born in the old Lynn General Hospital, it was the QEH where I was cared for after a nasty car accident in 1990. It was there that my children Alfie and Joanna were born and it was QEH midwives who delivered Tilly at home.

My dad and grandad both received amazing care there before their deaths, and, prone as I am, the accident and emergency department has come to my aid more than once. And this is just my story. Thousands of you, like me, have had the hospital as a constant factor in your lives. Which is why it is so important that we have a hospital which is fit for purpose.

Having only recently come back to Lynn, I had the pleasure last week of meeting the hospital’s deputy CEO Laura Skaife-Knight. We had a great chat about the importance of the relationship between the hospital and the Lynn News and how that cascades to the greater community.

And then she showed me around the hospital. And I was shocked.

I’d not visited since taking my poorly youngest daughter 10 years ago, when a hospital built with a 30-year lifespan was already slightly past its best. But now it’s hanging on for dear life.

There are more than 1,500 props holding up the fragile roof, with only 20% of it still in good working order. There are plastic bins in some of the corridors which catch rain when it leaks through the roof. The recent heavy rainfall saw three operating theatres temporarily closed.

Patients faced with views of creaking ceilings have asked to move wards, or even sleep with the lights on, and millions are being spent every year just keeping it operational… millions which could and should be ploughed into a new hospital.

The QEH was not in the list of 40 new hospitals drawn up by the Government in 2020 but there is hope it will be included in eight further schemes to be announced soon, hopefully by October. But 120 other hospitals also hope to make the magic eight.

Surely with South Norfolk MP Liz Truss and North Cambs member Steve Barclay, whose son was born at the QEH, riding high in Government - she is favourite to be our next prime minister and he is currently health secretary - we are in the driving seat.

We must be one of those eight. We simply must.