So what excites me about the New Hospital Programme is it's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future of healthcare for the people of Lancashire and beyond.
There are some very specific things within the programme that I think are absolutely fantastic. All of the new hospitals will be digitally enabled. So what that means is we can make the very best use of IT, diagnostics, AI, and many, many other things as well.
The hospital philosophy is very much designed around designing the flow of the hospital, the structure of the hospital around the flow of the work. And as part of that we will be involving staff and patients in the design. And then there will be some very, very practical things as well: having a campus facility I think will be a great opportunity for us, potentially also to bring in new partners but also very practical things such as more single room accommodation for our patients as well.
The main challenges that we have at the moment at the current Royal Preston sites are really about the actual fabric of the estate itself. The building itself was built in the late 70s, early 80s. It served us really well, but unfortunately we're now at a point where it's actually sort of reaching the end of its life. If you look at the backlog maintenance alone, that comes to about £157 million. And we did a recent survey of the current estate and what that showed very clearly was about 80% of it would need to be demolished and replaced in the medium to longer term. So clearly served us well but definitely now time for a change.