Hospital chiefs have formally submitted their plans for a £420 million redevelopment of the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Eastern Road, Brighton.
The 5,000 pages of plans include building a new 12-storey tower block and putting a helipad on the existing Thomas Kemp Tower.
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust has been working on the plans over the past few years and has won a funding pledge from the coalition government.
But it all hinges on the plans being given permission by Brighton and Hove City Council.
Duncan Selbie, chief executive of the hospital trust, hopes to have planning permission by the end of the year.
If permission is granted, he hopes that the Department of Health will sign off the spending in January with the Treasury giving its approval in February.
The aim is to start building work next year with the project expected to take up to ten years to complete.
The value of the development is more than four times the cost of Brighton and Hove Albion’s new stadium in Falmer.
It is expected to create space for 360 beds as the Royal Sussex becomes a regional centre of excellence in teaching, trauma and tertiary care (known as the 3Ts).
While the original Barry building is much-loved, it was completed in 1828 and is widely regarded as unsuitable for a 21st-century hospital. The Jubilee building is only slightly newer and also needs replacing. Neither makes efficient use of what has become a cramped site.
Neighbours are due to take part in a monthly meeting of the Hospital Liaison Group on Monday evening (26 September).
Councillor Craig Turton, one of the three Labour members who represent East Brighton, chairs the liaison group.
He praised hospital bosses for maintaining a dialogue through the liaison group with people who would be affected by ten years of construction work and traffic.
He said that it was important to work out the best ways to mitigate the noise, dust and vibration that would affect people living near the site.
While the plans allow for more than 800 parking spaces, including a new 350-space underground car park, there are concerns that this will not be enough.
These are among the issues that the liaison group tries to tackle.
When the Royal Alex Children’s Hospital was given planning consent for the RSCH site, one of its Conditions of Consent was the requirement to produce a traffice plan for the proposed site area within a stated period.
Six months after the deadline had passed and the hospital was up and running and the north road access to it, the car park and the Renal Dept., this had still not been produced and the access road was a nightmare for ambulance and car park access with that road permanently jammed and nothing in place.
I made a complaint to Planning and something was cobbled together in the end which has been endlessly changed ever since, including the erection of a board displaying waiting times for a parking space, on again, off again, on again specially employed people to direct the traffic and ambulances having to drop renal patients far short of the entrance through impossibility of access.
The Renal Department now has only two parking bays for ambulance access and egress. This matters because of the huge numbers of seriously ill people on dialysis who need close access.
This same nightmare will be repeated for the Eastern Road proposals and Eastern Road is not tucked away, hidden from view as the northerly access road is, above the A&E entrance.
This 2-acre site is far too small for the ambitions everyone has for it.
The Neville Road polyclinic site was originally going to be a site for a major general hospital. A consultant (still angry after all these years) once told me it did not happen because 3 authorities could not agree with each other: namely, Hove Borough Council, Brighton Council and the East Sussex County Council. It is a ridiculously under-used site with the Polyclinic fronted by driveway and parking space big enough to take the entire newbuild now planned to replace the Eastern Road RSCH frontage.