Plans for the New Hospital - Trust Annual Report 1968
On conclusion of the formal business at the Extraordinary General Meeting, Associate members and the general public were admitted. The Chairman then welcomed five members of the project team of the Wessex Regional Hospital Board. These included an administrator, a doctor, a nurse, an engineer and an architect. The plans were looked at from the point of view of regional needs and organisation, finance, the modern requirements of medicine and surgery, nursing and economy of staff, the great increase of services required by modern science and technology, and considerations of planning, siting and architectural problems.
The talks were illustrated by slides with the utmost thoroughness and lucidity. The size of the task, the organisation and planning, were matter of which the members of the Trust were hardly aware.
This open meeting provided an opportunity for residents in the Romsey Road and Queens Road area to voice their protests on the way in which the plans would be imposed and their houses demolished without adequate compensation. From questions which were asked after the meeting the following points emerged.
In developing a larger complex of new buildings on the present site the Wessex Regional Board was following Ministry of Health policy, which was to develop as many sites as possible simultaneously, so that each area could derive the utmost benefit at once. The alternative would involve building a whole hospital every two or three years, with the result that the last in the queue would have to wait twenty years or more for a new hospital, and that last one might be Winchester.
It has to be remembered also that a hospital must be within easy and inexpensive reach of public transport. The services required by a hospital are the equivalent of those for one thousand dwelling houses, and the further these are moved out of a town the more prohibitive becomes the cost. For the sake of economy, rational planning, and accessibility there was really no alternative site which could be used.