TWO of Gwent's biggest hospital sites are being surveyed to determine their suitability to play a part in multi-million pound plans to modernise the area's health services.

Architects are studying Nevill Hall Hospital, Abergavenny, and County Hospital, Griffithstown, to find out how feasible it would be to remodel them to fit emerging proposals for hospitals as part of a project known as Clinical Futures.

This plan, being developed by Gwent Healthcare Trust and Newport, Torfaen, Blaenau Gwent, Monmouthshire and Caerphilly Local Health Boards, proposes a network of five or six Local General Hospitals (LGHs) providing a range of emergency and routine care, backed up by a centrally located Specialist and Critical Care Centre focusing on complex cases.

Plans for two new LGHs - in Blaenau Gwent and Caerphilly - are well advanced, but others will be required, and existing hospital sites are being surveyed to discover the options.

An earlier study of the Royal Gwent Hospital concluded that it would be extremely difficult to remodel the site to meet the aims of Clinical Futures while trying to maintain a service there.

The Nevill Hall and County Hospital studies, being carried out by architects Capita Percy Thomas, are considering the same issue and also whether these sites are in the right locations for hospitals delivering a modern, 21st Century service.

An initial estimate of the total cost of providing new hospitals to fit the Clinical Futures model is £790 million, though the eventual figure depends to a considerable extent on the outcome of surveys such as these.

Clinical Futures proposes a hospital service providing emergency and elective treatments, diagnostics and therapies on a more local level, with a bigger role for primary care. It has so far taken almost three years, and has been a project in which planning the services required has taken predecence over the buildings in which they are to be provided.

Now however, Gwent health chiefs are turning their attention to the facilities needed.