Many medical services in Sutton and Epsom will have to be moved if a Government grant for money to build new hospital buildings at Epsom and St Helier is successful.

Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust chief executive Daniel Elkeles told a Sutton Council scrutiny committee meeting on Wednesday, April 13, that should the NHS Trust get half a billion pounds from the government to build new hospital facilities that some of the way some services were provided and may have to be reallocated.

He said: “The biggest problem we’ve got is this: our buildings are really poor.

“And when you are thinking about what you will do to change services to make it financially and clinically sustainable, one of the things you factor in is the state of the buildings.

“So, our determination as a Trust is that we come up with a solution to our buildings, which is clinically and financially viable before our organisation so that we never get back into services that could be taken away from us.

“We want to put on the table ‘here is a brilliant answer’ for the residents in Sutton and Epsom that says you can have fantastic acute hospital services that are affordable on the NHS and deliver high quality and have them in lovely buildings.”

Mr Elkeles added the Trust would review the duplication and positioning of some services and said: “That’s the position we want, but you are right to highlight that that is going to mean services in their current configuration can’t stay in their current configuration. Something has to change to enable us to benefit from our catchment area.”

But Dave Ash, a founding member of Keep Our St Helier Hospital, told the Epsom Guardian he was sceptical and concerned about what a redistribution of services would mean for patients.

He said: “Any service that was kept open after another closed would need double the capacity, but I’m not hearing anything about that.

“I would love to have new, lovely buildings, but that does not automatically make them safer.

“In fact after we were told that Epsom and St Helier were some of the worst buildings for delivering safe care Mr Elkeles said it had never been safer and that we were one of the safest hospitals in London.”