TOMORROW’S planned march on Bootham Park Hospital is a potent reminder that it is exactly a year since York’s only NHS-run in-patient mental hospital was abruptly closed.

Since then, anyone in York needing admission to a psychiatric hospital has faced being transferred 50 miles or more away.

Plans to convert Peppermill Court in York as a temporary psychiatric inpatient unit have themselves been delayed by several weeks because of a fire. It is, therefore, more important than ever that the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV) sticks to its deadline of January 2019 for building and opening a new psychiatric hospital in York.

The question is, where should it be? Three sites are being consulted on: the existing Bootham Park site; Clifton Park Hospital off Shipton Road; and the former Vicker and Bio-Rad factory site in Haxby Road.

In today’s Press, former consultant psychiatrist Bob Adams argues strongly that the new hospital should be built at Bootham Park.

We’re not entirely sure we agree. It was clear long before it closed so abruptly that Bootham Park was no longer really fit for purpose as a mental hospital.

There is a real opportunity now to build a first-class, state-of-the-art modern psychiatric hospital: one that could end years of York being the poor relation when it comes to mental health provision.

If that really can be done on the Bootham Park site, fine. But we shouldn’t build it there just for sentimental reasons. We need to be looking to the future, not the past: and the new hospital should be built on the site that will best serve the needs of the vulnerable patients who will use it. They deserve nothing less.