Hospital building - another big blow

Even then there is no certainty that the hospital will be built, as the scheme has become bogged down in the major review of the NHS in Sussex and Surrey currently underway.

Campaigners for the hospital had their hopes raised at a private meeting with health minister Caroline Flint last month, when she gave the regional NHS authority two weeks to make up its mind on the future of the scheme.

But now the new NHS South East Coast authority has announced it will not give the green light to the hospital while its wide-ranging review continues.

A spokesman told the Gazette: "The NHS in Surrey and Sussex recently published 'Creating an NHS Fit for the Future' to encourage debate about the opportunities that exist to re-design services to secure clinically and financially sustainable healthcare services.

"Adur, Arun and Worthing Teaching Primary Care Trust and NHS South East Coast are agreed that the Arun Community Hospital scheme has much to commend it but, in an area where the local hospital (Worthing) has a sizeable deficit and the financial risk across the whole of West Sussex is significant, we cannot commit to the implementation of this scheme ahead of any wider plan for sustainability which we anticipate will be ready in the autumn."

Even if such a plan is ready on time, and the Arun Community Hospital is saved from the axe which is also hanging over hospital services at Worthing and Chichester, there seems little prospect that meetings of the new Western Sussex Primary Care Trust and the NHS South East Coast board would confirm their approval before the end of 2006.

It was in March that the then Surrey and Sussex Strategic Health Authority (SHA) announced a six-month delay to work starting on the project, on the site of the old Littlehampton Hospital, which was demolished more than a year earlier.

Financial agreements for the scheme were just days from being signed, and contractors were due to move on site within a couple of weeks.

The SHA blamed spiralling deficits in the NHS across the region, up to #100m, for the delay, but ironically the trust for the Littlehampton area was debt-free.

The town's MP Nick Gibb, who arranged the meeting with the health minister and SHA officials, said the minister had also told him that "responsibility for decisions on the future of Arun Community Hospital rests with the local NHS".

Mr Gibb told the Gazette: ""There still remains a clear threat to the future of the community hospital in Littlehampton, but I would be staggered if the rebuilding plans weren't ultimately resumed, given that community hospitals are now very much part of Government policy, and the indications we received from officials at our meeting with the health minister."