NHS England's New Hospital Programme delivery director joins Future Cities Forum

Above: CGI of the new Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital which is in the first wave of the New Hospital Programme (Courtesy NBBJ)

Future Cities Forum is delighted that Katie Gosling, Director of Delivery, Strategy and Improvement for NHS England's New Hospital Programme, will be joining our 'Future hospitals and R&D campuses' discussion event this week at Barts North Wing in Smithfield, City of London..

Before her current role, Katie was Head of Delivery at the NHS for East, North and Midlands for over two and a half years with the role of Assistant Director for Delivery, New Hospital Programme leading up to this. She was also Strategic Estates Lead for the NHS from 2019.

Her skills have been developed additionally at Lincolnshire County Council where for over seventeen years Katie was Head of Property Strategy as well as holding managerial roles. She was educated at Liverpool John Moores University.

Katie has been working with Mike Shaw at Mace, on the New Hospital Programme, and he will also join the discussion.

The discussion run by Future Cities Forum will ask questions about the NHP which was announced in October 2020 to deliver forty new hospitals by 2030.

Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, has stated:

'Despite the claim, there were not 40 ‘new’ schemes and some were just refurbishments or extensions. To put it simply - there were not 40 of them, they were not all new and many were not even hospitals. The spin that had been applied to the programme was widely known before the election. But even knowing that, I was shocked by what I found on entering the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). The programme was hugely delayed, by several years more than had already been revealed by the National Audit Office. Most shocking of all, the funding for the programme was due to run out in March of this year, with no provision for future years whatsoever. The money simply was not there. The programme was built on the shaky foundation of false hope and without the confirmed funding these building projects could not be delivered, let alone delivering them all in the next 5 years.

'If I was shocked by the state of this programme, patients ought to be furious. Not only because the promises made to them were never going to be kept. They also desperately need new buildings and new hospitals. The NHS is quite literally crumbling. I have visited hospitals where the roof has fallen in, pipes regularly leak and even freeze over in winter. As Lord Darzi found in his investigation, the NHS was starved of capital in the 2010s, with £37 billion under-investment over the 2010s. This lack of investment meant the UK construction sector did not have the appetite and capacity to build the number of concurrent hospitals required to deliver 40 new hospitals by 2030 when this promise was made. Delivery is dependent on providing certainty to develop relationships and secure investments in the supply chain which would ensure this vital hospital infrastructure is realised.'