ºÚ¶´ÉçÇø

Sunday 6 October was a big day for the residents of Sandwell and west Birmingham. Their new hospital, the Midland Metropolitan University Hospital (MMUH), finally opened its doors six years later than originally planned.

The largest in the region, this super hospital has 736 beds and 11 operating theatres, an A&E department, diagnostic suites and research and education departments, and should make a massive difference to healthcare prospects for local people. But getting to this point has been a long, hard and expensive slog, with the finished hospital costing just under £1bn, nearly three times as much as in the original business case.

The hammer blow came in January 2018 when Carillion, which was building the hospital under a PFI contract, went bust. The Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust struggled to find anyone else prepared to continue the scheme under the PFI contract because the costs of finishing the project exceeded its value