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The cost to repair the NHS estate shows no sign of abating and is now at a record £11bn.

What’s more, some trusts with the largest bills will have less money to play with this year, as a result of a new financial regime that docks capital budgets.  

Both Guy’s and St Thomas and Nottingham University Hospitals have a backlog maintenance bill — which is the estimated cost to bring estates back to a suitable condition — of more than £400m.

HSJ has found both will have less money for infrastructure upgrades this year, with GSTT docked £2m and NUH £5m from capital budgets. 

The financial regime was overhauled in May as NHS England tried to balance the books. The new rules mean systems in deficit can have capital budgets slashed by up to 10 per cent.

Several other trusts with large backlog maintenance costs confirmed their maintenance and upgrade budgets have been cut as a result. This includes £5m for Mid and South Essex FT, who said this would lead to schemes being further “descoped, deferred and/or amended”.

Orders to March

NHSE has directed systems and providers to eliminate or significantly reduce 104-week waits for community mental health services by March 2025, following a decline in performance.

This directive was revealed in a webinar last week, where mental health programme directors outlined the implementation of the new metric this autumn.

They specified that when an integrated care board or provider has a “small number” of 104-week waits, they should aim to end them by March and outline “trajectories” for 78-week and 52-week waits.

For larger numbers of long waits, NHSE advised that integrated care boards should collaborate with providers to develop an improvement plan throughout 2024-25, detailing ICB and provider-level trajectories and submitting these soon.

“At a minimum, ICBs should ensure that less than 10 per cent of community mental health waits exceed 104 weeks.”

Though no figures are published for these waiting times, NHS Digital data indicates that as of April, over 32,000 children and young people had waited more than two years for an appointment. Among adults, the 90th centile wait was 2.2 years, with 24,600 still waiting two years after referral. Both CYP and adult figures have worsened since September.

Also on hsj.co.uk

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