‘Pandemic proves Island needs a new hospital’

Lyndon Farham at Overdale Hospital Picture: DAVID FERGUSON

Senator Lyndon Farnham – who is the political lead for the new hospital project planned for Overdale – has sought to reiterate that the Island’s ‘ageing health estate’ was the driving force behind keeping the project on schedule.

He added that the new facility would attract and retain the ‘best clinical staff’ while accommodating the aspirations of the ‘new and future Jersey Care Models’.

Following several false starts, the States Assembly has now agreed both a preferred site for the hospital and a favoured access route. However, the selections have proved controversial with residents’ groups near Westmount voicing concerns over the proposals. A recent St Helier Parish Assembly also voted to instruct the parish to prevent ‘any further interference’ with its land by those involved in the hospital project and, if necessary, to take legal action to ‘resist any attempt by the public to acquire the land’ before details of the acquisition had been evaluated.

Senator Farnham said that the ageing hospital at Gloucester Street was driving a renewed focus to deliver the project.

‘The States have so far deliberated for over eight years and spent considerable sums of money and failed at all previous attempts to deliver a new hospital but, at last, we are making progress,’ he said. ‘The timeline and momentum, which is now driving the project, is determined by our ageing health estate and the unsustainable cost of maintaining it beyond 2026.

‘The current pandemic has highlighted the need for a new hospital, now more than ever. The States have selected Overdale as their preferred site and we must now deliver.’

During a recent Covid-19 press conference, Chief Minister John Le Fondré said that the project would grow more expensive ‘the longer you leave it’ and that further delays would not be in the interest of the health of the Island.

‘The hospital is a once-in-a-generation project,’ he said. ‘It is a special place that every Islander will, at some point in their life, visit. What has been very clear, and some of our medical teams have already said it publicly, is that we have fantastic staff that have been working under fantastic strain and doing fantastic things generally – let alone in the last 12 months with the pandemic. But the facilities that they operate under are poor, relative to what we should be expecting in the 21st century.

‘The longer you leave it, the more expensive it will get. We have been through a whole process, we’ve come to a site – it has an impact on a small group of Islanders – but we as politicians, myself as Chief Minister, Lyndon as Deputy Chief Minister, Richard [Renouf] as Health Minister and all the rest of the Council of Ministers, have to look at the health of the Island, of roughly 105,000 Islanders.’

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