A bright future for Halton Hospital
There have been a lot of rumours recently about the future of Halton Hospital. There have been some stories on social media and other platforms suggesting, quite wrongly, that the site has no future. This is strange given that the local NHS has invested heavily in services on the site in recent years, including the transfer of the Cheshire and Merseyside Treatment Centre building to Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, the development of additional elective services and the opening of a new Urgent Care Centre. As you may have also seen elsewhere in the media, we now want to take this to the next level, working with the Trust and Halton Borough Council.
Exciting plans to develop a fully integrated community focused health and wellbeing campus at Halton Hospital have been unveiled. This comes as a result of the selection of the Halton Lea area that surrounds the Halton Hospital campus as one of NHS England’s Healthy New Towns demonstrator sites in March 2016. The ‘healthy new town’ concept aims to shape the health of communities and rethink how health and care services can be delivered within communities. This work is being led by Halton Borough Council, working with the NHS, and represents the efforts of a wide range of partners across the health and social care, retail and leisure, housing and regeneration sectors.
Our plans are still being formulated and more information is available here This is, we believe, a once in a generation opportunity to do something different and innovative with existing NHS estate at heart of a local community. If we pull this off the future for Halton Hospital is very bright indeed.
Simon Banks
