£34m spent on stalled NHS centres for ops backlog

More than £34m has been spent developing plans for five delayed NHS treatment centres which are meant to deal with a backlog of operations.

Plans to build the national treatment centres (NTCs) at sites across Scotland were put on hold in February last year and a decision on their future is not expected until later this year.

Figures obtained by the BBC show £34.2m has been spent on planning for the surgery centres in Livingston, Perth, Aberdeen, Ayr and Cumbernauld which face an uncertain future.

The Scottish government said an update on the centres would be provided after the UK government's Spending review this spring.

The network of treatment centres across Scotland was intended to deliver at least 40,000 additional elective surgeries, diagnostics and other procedures per year by 2026.

Four of the centres are up and running, one has been further committed to by Scottish ministers but a question mark remains over five more after a series of delays.

Figures released to BBC Scotland show just over £34m has been spent on the unbuilt centres.

This covers buying properties, designing the buildings and staffing costs.

Last month, First Minister John Swinney said the health service would carry out an extra 150,000 appointments and procedures in the coming year.

That would include 10,000 through "smarter working" at the existing national treatment centres and thousands more procedures at hospitals.

Clare Fallas says she couldn't believe her eyes when she checked the latest waiting times for inpatient orthopaedics surgery on the NHS Lothian website.

At the time, the Edinburgh charity worker was looking at a 118-week wait for the knee surgery she required.

"I kept on having to read it again and again as I could not believe what I was seeing," she says.

"I just thought, if I have to wait 118 weeks for my surgery I will not be fit or healthy when that comes around. I'll be massively overweight, my mental health will be in the gutter and my whole family life will have been affected in that time."

Clare, who had already had two successful NHS operations on her knee after a skiing accident, decided 118 weeks was too long to wait and will now spend more than £4,000 on private surgery to the cartilage of her knee later this month.

"Had it been even a six-month wait I would have waited and had it done on the NHS, I probably could have tolerated that," she added.

"I just feel really sorry for the people who are not lucky enough to be in my position and be able to make the sacrifices we're going to be making to in order to pay for private treatment."

Figures released to BBC Scotland show that a total of £9.7m has been spent developing plans for a treatment centre in the grounds of St John's Hospital, Livingston.

This would be one of the biggest surgery centres in Scotland and was originally projected to cost £70.9m and open in 2027.

However, the last cost estimate came in 2023 when it was suggested it would cost £184m.

Another planned treatment centre in Perth has cost £12.5m so far, one in Aberdeen has racked up £6.8m in development costs and one in Cumbernauld, where a site has still to be found, has cost £323,000.

Private facility Carrick Glen Hospital in Ayr was bought by NHS Ayrshire and Arran in 2022 for £1.8m with the view to refurbish it and create a treatment centre to open this year.

This work is now on hold but £2.9m has been spent developing the plans so far.

Dr Syed Ahmar Shah, of the University of Edinburgh's Usher Institute, led a recent study which found that without any increase in capacity, waiting lists in Scotland will jump to nearly one million people by December next year.

He said: "The government's plan was that by the end of 2025/26 they would increase inpatient capacity by 55,000 and about 40,000 of that was supposed to come from these national treatment centres, so a substantial portion was supposed to come from these centres."

The four NTCs up and running are in Clydebank, Kirkcaldy, Inverness and Larbert.

They are used by all of Scotland's health boards and have been credited with helping to reduce the backlog of operations.

However, the facility at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert is only partially open as its 30-bed ward has faced a series of delays.

Another planned treatment centre is a replacement for the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion in Edinburgh.

Scottish ministers committed to progressing this centre in its last budget along with a number of other NHS projects, such as a new hospital in Fort William.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "Our £139m additional investment across NHS infrastructure will allow our health capital programme to restart, and we will set out our revised infrastructure investment plan following the UK government's spending review."