A £3bn NHS hospital building programme announced yesterday will include 26 "fast-track" centres to speed up the treatment of non-urgent patients who often have their appointments cancelled.
Health secretary Alan Milburn said 29 building projects, worth £3.1bn, had been approved by his department. There will be an 11% increase in funding for training NHS staff, to alleviate the shortage of doctors, nurses and other professionals.
Every region in the country would be required to increase hospital beds to end the misery of patients being shipped to hospitals miles from home because of bed shortages.
"This is an unprecedented expansion in new hospital developments in the NHS," Mr Milburn told the House of Commons. "For millions of patients and thousands of staff it will provide modern state-of-the-art hospital treatment and care." The Department of Health was preparing to allow 18 schemes, but is approving all 29 recommended by its expert advisers.
The hospital projects will be built under the public finance initiative, with an option for the NHS to resume ownership at the end of the contract.
Work will begin this year on the first 12, in Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol's mental health services, Central Middlesex, East Kent, Leicester, Lewisham, Peterborough, Salford, Tunbridge Wells, Wakefield and Whipps Cross in London.
"You cannot deliver 21st century care in 19th century buildings," Mr Milburn said. "For too long investment in NHS infrastructure has been a low priority when it should have been a high priority.
"The consequences are plain for all to see: buildings that are shoddy, equipment that is unreliable, hospitals that are out of date. In too many places the environment where staff work and patients receive care is simply unacceptable."
Sixteen of the new hospitals will have the fast-track centres, which will treat only patients who need routine operations such as hip replacements. In most hospitals, planned surgery is always at risk of being cancelled to make way for emergencies. Ten other fast-track facilities will be built at existing hospitals.
"Patients will be able to book their admissions at their convenience rather than simply being given an appointment date," said Mr Milburn.
"Some will operate at weekends. Crucially they will mean greater reliability for patients by helping to end the misery of last-minute cancelled operations."
There are serious shortages of doctors and, particularly, nurses in the NHS, but Mr Milburn claimed that numbers have already risen in response to recruitment campaigns and new training places.
Between September 1999 and September 2000, there were 2,500 more doctors, 3,500 more scientists, therapists and technicians and over 6,300 more nurses in the NHS. The new money is intended to keep staff numbers increasing until 2010. The bed-cutting which has been a feature of the NHS for four decades is at an end, Mr Milburn said.
He told the Commons that 157,000 were cut between 1980 and 1997 alone. Every new hospital will have more beds than the one it replaces - 3,000 more in all.
Peter Hawker, chairman of the British Medical Association's consultants committee, said the big rise in beds was "excellent news provided the NHS is successful in recruiting the nurses and doctors required to staff them".
