the:projects

Fifers Invited to Help Shape the Future

The people of Fife are being asked to help shape the Kingdom’s hospital and maternity services for the 21st century.

A roadshow will travel around Fife in August to showcase competing designs for a £100 million Public Private Partnership investment in health services. The investment will provide a new wing at the Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy.

Three consortia are bidding to win the contract to build the new wing at the Victoria Hospital. It will be the designs for this new wing that will take to the roads of Fife during August. Among the services housed in the wing will be the emergency care centre for Fife, acute medical and surgical wards, a critical care unit and 11 operating theatres.

Ann McCarlie, project manager, said: “Work on building the new wing at the Victoria will start in 2007 and is due to be completed in 2010. We are hoping to announce in September which of the three consortia has won through to becoming our preferred bidder.

“The opinions of all the people of Fife will help influence which design we choose. And the new wing at the Victoria will be used by people from all over Fife, which is why we are taking the roadshow all around the Kingdom, from Dunfermline to Leven, Cupar to Kirkcaldy.”

Special roadshow dates have also been set up for NHS Fife staff to ask them what they think.

As part of the £100million investment in Fife’s hospital and maternity services, Kirkcaldy’s Forth Park Hospital, which provides maternity services, will close. Services will transfer to the Victoria and Queen Margaret Hospitals. The Forth Park site will then be sold.