PLANS for a new £150 million hospital to treat thousands of Hampshire's sickest patients have been thrown into serious doubt.

Health bosses look set to halt proposals for a critical treatment centre between Winchester and Basingstoke, which would centralise emergency and acute treatment in the centre of the county.

They have been advised that the scheme cannot proceed at this stage to formal consultation and without formal public consultation the hospital cannot go ahead.

However, Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which put forward the plans, has confirmed the scheme remains on the table.

The proposal, for land north of the M3’s junction 7, would offer 24-hour consultant care and include an £18.5m cancer treatment unit to centralise chemotherapy.

Most services at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester and Basingstoke and Andover hospitals would stay put, the trust has said.

But in a letter sent to stakeholders, West Hampshire and North Hampshire Clinical Commissioning Groups, which pay trusts including Hampshire Hospitals to provide health services, said it had reviewed the finances.

It said the conclusion, which will be put forward for approval to both CCG boards next week, was that "this proposal cannot go forward to formal consultation at present."The primary reason for this is that the predicted costs of services supplied in this way significantly exceed the funds available to commissioners."

The recommendation instead is to redesign health and social care across north and mid Hampshire, but the letter said it was "still possible" the proposed critical centre "might emerge" as part of that redesign.

Steve Brine MP, PPS to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, said: "A whole system approach that is able to fully combine hospital with social care must be right because its increasingly clear across the NHS that the success of one is heavily reliant on the other."

Mr Brine added: "I don't think grandstanding on this issue is going to help anyone. We must all work together with commissioners and providers, as well as councils, to move swiftly to a sustainable settlement for the local health economy because Winchester's problems haven't gone away and patient safety has to remain our priority."

Winchester councillor Martin Tod, on a county council committee that scrutinised the plans, said: "At every stage I have been concerned that I couldn't see how the numbers were going to add up.

"It's hard to see how two hospital sites to three would be more cost effective at a time when our focus is meant to be concentrating on more care in the community."

He said he also wanted reassurance that services for people in Winchester would be protected whether or not the centre went ahead.

In February, it was reported how Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust was running at a deficit of £4.4 million for the financial year to date.

And Cllr Tod estimated hundreds of thousands of pounds must have been spent so far on bringing plans for the new hospital forward, including a public exhibition earlier this year.

The trust was unable to provide costs to date.

Cllr Tod said if the numbers did not add up then the trust needed to "stop throwing good money after bad" and "start looking at other ways to tackle the real challenges of our health system".

Mary Edwards, trust chief executive, said it was "disappointed" that the consultation was not going ahead yet, but said ever increasing pressure on services made the need for a solution even more pressing.

"We fully appreciate the challenging financial context that the NHS faces, we are working with our commissioners, and we will continue to pursue solutions that are affordable and deliver high quality patient care.”