A new children’s hospital is provisionally due to open in Cambridge in 2025, it has been announced, although £100m in donations is still needed. 

The hospital, which will be known as ‘Cambridge Children’s’, will be situated on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, adjacent to Addenbrooke's Hospital and the Rosie Hospital, a women’s and maternity hospital.

The new hospital will provide both mental and physical health services for children, as well as carrying out academic research.

A fundraising campaign targeting philanthropists will commence in the spring to raise the £100m still needed to fund the hospital. The project has already received £100m in funding from the government, and £20m from land sales. 

The design team will be a partnership between architectural firms Hawkins/Brown and White Arkitekter, and services company Turner and Townsend, it was announced on Thursday (21/01).

They will consult with patients, families and carers, as well as the NHS trusts and the University in the design process. 

The hospital will be a partnership between Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH), which runs Addenbrooke’s and the Rosie, the University of Cambridge, and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT), which runs the mental health services in the County.

Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, approved the building of the paediatric hospital in December 2018, committing £100m of public funds. The funding came as part of a near £1bn package for NHS facilities, £19m of which it was announced will be given to Addenbrooke’s. 

In an online post, the new hospital’s partners said that Cambridge Children’s “aims to provide a whole new way of caring for young people, integrating mental and physical healthcare, alongside world leading academic research.” 

“Embedding genomic and psychological research alongside clinical expertise in physical and mental child health, Cambridge Children’s will be a brand new state-of-the-art hospital designed to take care of the whole child, not just their illness,” they continued.

The Director of Healthcare project management at Turner and Townsend, Clinton Green, said: “Cambridge Children’s Hospital will be a world leading facility for healthcare and clinical research and the combined experience of the design team is well matched for the bold ambition of this project. It is a huge privilege to have been appointed and we are looking forward to getting started and working with the entire project team.”

Meanwhile, Oliver Milton, Partner for Hawkins\Brown, commented: “Cambridge Children’s Hospital project represents an opportunity to consider a whole new approach to healthcare for young people – focused on the mind as well as the body – with research embedded alongside the clinical facilities.” 

The East of England is currently the only region in the country that has no specialist children’s hospital. Addenbrooke’s has 57 beds for children, some of which are on wards that were designed to accommodate adults, and were designed over 20 years ago. The hospital also manages referrals from 16 hospitals. Dr Rob Heuschkel, a consultant paediatric gastroenterologist, has described the facilities as “utterly inadequate”. 

Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen Toope told Varsity: “by helping us improve how we treat those young people unfortunate enough to be affected by serious childhood diseases, the new hospital has the potential to transform provision of healthcare for families in the East of England.”

Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner said in a press release that he "welcome[s] the appointment of a Design Team as the next stage in establishing a world-class children’s facility for the region.” 

He added: “clearly this announcement comes at a time of unprecedented pressure on our NHS but doctors in paediatric care have long been pressing for a specialist Children’s Hospital. This will be good for Cambridge and the health of many young people." 

Elsewhere, it was announced that plans for a new five-storey laboratory and office building in the Cambridge Biomedical Campus were approved on 20th January. As well as offering office and lab space, the building will contain public workspace and a public cafe.