ANOTHER week, another intriguing development on the Warrington Hospital front, it would appear.

Warrington North MP Helen Jones started the ball rolling, with her assertion that plans had been discussed at a council health scrutiny board for a new home for ‘The Borough’.

Hospitals chief executive Mel Pickup was quick to counter claims it would be on the south side of the Ship Canal.

But there was an admission that the possibility WAS under consideration, even if a location is some way from being finalised.

Who said NHS reforms for Cheshire and Merseyside were cloaked in secrecy and supposition?

Perish the thought!

Several well-observed arguments (and some parochial backbiting) ensued on the Guardian website, as the implications sank in.

Leaving aside the understandable anguish over what north Cheshire’s health service masters may have inflicted on Halton Hospital in recent years, the debate is developing nicely.

Not for one minute does Podium believe the hospital board would be thick-headed enough to deposit a new general hospital on the wrong side of the swing bridges.

(I’m not keen on volunteering to cover the first inquest of an emergency case dying in the back of an ambulance because a sewage barge was rumbling through town.) However the overall concept must score highly on basic logic – many parts of the Lovely Lane complex have seen better days Ambulance response times from one half of Warrington are not assisted by having to negotiate Bridge Foot en-route and the parking nightmare in and around the hospital can probably be relieved but never completely solved.

Surely a chunk of Omega, or the fields thereabouts, could be set aside for such a major project?

The health economy is already coalescing around the M62 corridor – and Warrington patients may well be heading up the carriageway to Whiston for certain services at some point in the near future so this would seem ideal.

Medical provisions have changed down the years, from Warrington Infirmary to the original Borough Hospital buildings to today’s general hospital, according to demand, so there should be no room for sentimentality here.

Podium will put down a marker though – how will this be funded? If the words ‘private finance initiative’ hove into view, shudder good people.

Your correspondent watched as a new PFI hospital sprung up in Blackburn and extra wards were built in nearby Burnley – with interest rates so high one union official said it would have been ‘cheaper to pay for it by Barclaycard’.

  •  This weeks’ random gratuitous plug is for Julie Hogan Textiles & Habderdashery, of Latchford.

Thanks to a mutual friend on Facebook, it appears she is going great guns with her fledgling enterprise above Subway, in Kingsway South.

I’m all for former Boteler folk using their expertise to create something that little bit different.

Who knows, I might follow that advice myself some day.