NHS chiefs ‘pressured to sign off children’s hospital despite f laws’
‘Decision made to get it to bidders’
AN architect involved in the design of a crisis-hit £150million children’s hospital says health bosses were ‘pressured’ to sign off the building despite knowing about drainage issues. Robert Menzies said clinicians signed off the delayed plans for the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People in Edinburgh in 2011, though architects were unhappy.
Mr Menzies’ said the template for the project, described as a ‘political hot potato’, was then rushed through when private backers were introduced, despite awareness of ‘residual technical issues’.
Health Secretary Jeane Freeman this week said further checks have been ordered at the hospital after its opening was delayed at the eleventh hour when an inspection raised concerns over the ventilation system.
Earlier this week, trade union Unison claimed the building might have to be demolished after declaring it ‘unfit for purpose’ as a result of drainage issues, which leaders said have led to the empty building being flooded twice.
Mr Menzies, who has now retired but has 40 years’ experience, told The Herald: ‘Part of the problem was that there was too much inexperience in a lot of the team’s designing departments.
‘It would come to me for comment and I’d be saying, “You need to change that, you can’t do this”.
‘So instead of doing tweaking, you were doing major redesign without getting the tweaking done, and the clinicians were being put in a position where they were under pres‘The sure to sign it off because we need to get on and get it out to bidders.
‘I said we could do with another three months, but the decision was made to get it out to bidders and leave it up to them to fix these mistakes.’
The building is already costing NHS Lothian £1.4million a month in repayments, with officials this week admitting they do not know how much more it will cost to address problems at the site.
The payments are being made to private consortium Integrated Health Solutions Lothian (IHSL).
Mr Menzies and his firm was one of three bidders involved in the early design stages of the hospital but lost out to IHSL.
He said his firm managed to solve a string of issues in the design bid, only for the remedies to be rejected in favour of a previously developed ‘exemplar plan’ for fear of causing more delays. Mr Menzies added: company I was with were one of the bid teams. We spent a lot of time getting rid of these problems, only to be told, “No, we want a copy of the [exemplar] design”.
‘That’s where it started to get daft because we’ve sorted a problem and been marked down for it.’
He added: ‘You should try to avoid putting a drain under a hospital because if it overflows, it overflows into the hospital.
‘You want your drainage coming down and going beyond the footprint of the hospital where you can get access if anything goes wrong, without it overflowing into a corridor in the hospital.
‘In the bid that we did, we took a lot of stuff out of the basement, including car parking, because there was a worry about flooding.’
Susan Goldsmith, finance director of NHS Lothian, said: ‘The delay has been caused by issues unrelated to any of the points made by Mr Menzies, but by a problem with ventilation in Critical Care.
‘Further tests are being carried out to gain additional assurance that required standards are met.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘Audit Scotland commissioned Scott-Moncrieff to carry out a high level review of arrangements around the settlement agreement between NHS Lothian and the contractor.
‘The results of this review will be considered as part of the independent audit of the governance arrangements for the hospital that KPMG are conducting to provide an external and impartial assessment of the factors leading to the delay.’