Pride in the job shines through at Cumnock

HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie visited one such facility – the East Ayrshire Community Hospital in southern Scotland – where he found two strong PFI advocates in the hospital’s facilities manager, Scott Gibson, and John Little, national business and soft FM services development manager at the same company, BAM FM, which designed and built the hospital 10 years ago, and operates it under a 25-year concession.

 Among the many criticisms levelled at the UK PFI healthcare model in recent years have been the contention that proper risk transfer to the private sector has never been achieved, that PFI consortia have “profiteered” through excessive margins at the expense of financially-beleaguered NHS Trusts, that ongoing maintenance has at times been neglected due to cost concerns, and that the high ongoing cost of PFI hospitals has forced service cuts at neighbouring publicfunded healthcare facilities. Those opposed to the model have also argued that, with some NHS Trusts becoming “preoccupied” with the design and management of their PFI contracts, patients’ immediate needs have, on occasions, risked being sidelined. Despite such concerns, a recent National Audit Office report into the running and management of English PFIfunded hospitals, “The performance and management of PFI hospital contracts” (HEJ – October 2010), suggested that, although some NHS Trusts were devoting insufficient in-house personnel to managing such contracts, and that many would struggle to make the short-tomedium term efficiency savings demanded by Government due to their contracts’ terms, most of the 70-plus English PFI contracts now operational were indeed achieving the “value-formoney expected when contracts were signed”. One of the first PFI-funded hospitals to be built in Scotland, and also the first PFI concession undertaken by HBG Construction (now BAM Construct UK) was the East Ayrshire Community Hospital in Cumnock near Ayr. Opened in the summer of 2000, four months of schedule, having taken HBG Construction just 16 months to build, the hospital was designed to provide replacement and additional services for the nearby Ballochmyle General Hospital, which was originally built as a recuperative facility for First World War soldiers in a converted former baronial hall, and had served the local community well for over 60 years. While nursing staff who worked there said the hospital provided both excellent nurse training, and a high standard of patient care, such was its design – it for instance still incorporated Nightingale wards – that “bolting on” the additional facilities and services needed to provide 21st Century healthcare would, NHS Ayrshire and Arran said, have been extremely difficult. Some five miles from the nearest town, the hospital was also difficult for many local residents to reach, and, with Cumnock being one of the region’s largest communities, with good local bus, rail, and road links, the town was considered an excellent location for a new community hospital.

Cumnock’s ‘ideal location’