Fight to stop Devon hospital wing demolition at critical stage

A community group working to save an East Devon community hospital wing from demolition, is hoping to have an answer to its business plan next month.

The Seaton Hospital Steering Group, which met in early December, alongside MP, Richard Foord, has been waiting for a response to a business case for a community health and wellbeing hub.

The initiative would be based in a part of the hospital that previously accommodated 18 beds, which were closed in 2017.

Since the beds closed, NHS Property Services, which took over the ownership of Eastern Devon community hospitals around a decade ago, started charging the local NHS £300,000 a year rent for the now empty wing.

NHS Devon, one of the most financially challenged health organisations in the country, has previously set out a range of options for the wing, one of which included sale and demolition.

The steering group’s chair, Cllr Jack Rowland, explained: “Residents were understandably outraged when they heard that their beloved hospital, built just 35 years ago, was proposed to be partly demolished a few years after losing all its in-patient beds. Many of them helped fundraise millions of pounds to get the hospital rebuilt in the first place, so it was a double blow.”

More than 400 residents attended a public meeting in November 2023 about the risk to the hospital and more than 9,000 people in the town later signed a petition to protect the hospital.

Cllr Rowland continued: “A group of us set up Seaton Hospital Steering Group and have been working with NHS Property Services and representatives from NHS Devon’s Integrated Care Board for many months. We came up with a comprehensive business plan for a community health and wellbeing hub, encompassing 18 organisations providing dementia services, as well as early years care, which we submitted in June.

"We’re hoping that a decision now looks closer as NHSPS is in the process of rewriting their social prescribing policy that should be concluded next month.”

The steering group successfully registered the building as an Asset of Community Value earlier this year, which they also hope will protect it.

Richard Foord, who attends the steering group meetings and is working to save all of the hospital, said: “A reply from health minister, Karin Smyth, to my most recent letter requesting protection for the hospital, suggested that due to its new status as an Asset of Community Value, in her view, demolition would only take place as a last resort, but this doesn’t seem reassuring.

“I urge NHS Property Services and NHS Devon to look positively on our business plan to create a health and wellbeing hub in the hospital. It’s just a shame that the community has had to fight so hard to retain something so obviously cherished - and by rights, that should be owned - by the local community.

“The system of charging one cash-strapped NHS organisation huge sums of money to keep a hospital wing open, which could lead to an almost new building being demolished, is a very strange way to run the NHS in my opinion and I demand a more sensible way of managing our NHS property.”