A PRIVATE hospital leased four years ago by the NHS is to be closed for lack of patients.

Ravenscourt Park Hospital in West London — the former Royal Masonic Hospital — was acquired by Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust in 2002 on a 15-year lease.

It was lauded by ministers at the time as being the future of elective surgery, a dedicated NHS centre concentrating on a limited number of procedures and offering top-class facilities.

The deal was struck when ministers believed that the NHS was short of capacity. Ravenscourt Park, with six theatres and 105 beds, was improved at a cost of £14 million to help to cut waiting lists for operations. But there was never a true shortage of capacity in the NHS, and Ravenscourt Park has lacked the patients to make the investment work.

During the four years since it was leased, 18,500 operations have been conducted at the hospital, an average of about 4,500 a year. But this was uneconomic, and the hospital was losing £12 million a year. To break even it needed to treat 11,000 to 12,000 patients a year.

Other hospitals in the region were asked to send patients there to try to balance the books. But payment by results means that hospitals are paid by the number of patients, giving an incentive to keep patients, even when they may be treated more quickly elsewhere.

The trust will close the unit, but the deal it signed in 2002 means that it must continue to spend up to £5 million a year on maintenance, security and rent until the lease runs out in 2017, unless it can find somebody else to take it over.

Under a plan announced yesterday, 2,500 patients a year will transfer to Charing Cross Hospital in Central London, 1,100 to St Mary’s, Paddington, and the rest to Central and West Middlesex hospitals.

The Hammersmith trust has an accumulated deficit of £20 million, most of it because of Ravenscourt Park.

The Patient and Public Involvement Forum at the trust, which represents patient opinion, has refused to support the closure. In a letter to Derek Smith, the trust’s chief executive, the forum says that Ravenscourt Park provided “an absolutely outstanding patient experience”. It has a clean, pleasant and tranquil environment, low levels of MRSA, good public transport access, dedicated theatre space and no cancellations, the letter says.

The forum is examining whether proper consultation was carried out, as stipulated by the 2001 Health and Social Care Act. If not, the trust could be forced to backtrack. Last week the Court of Appeal ruled that the award of a contract for GP services to a private company could not go ahead because patients had not been adequately consulted.

The trust said that the move would transfer services, not close them down. Mr Smith said: “There will be no loss of services as a result of the transfer, and patients will also be able to choose to be treated for straightforward procedures at other West London hospitals near to where they live.”

A trust spokesman said that discussions were continuing to find a new use for the hospital, which is a listed building.

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