PLANS for a superhospital at Hatfield have been scrapped and a major review of acute hospital services in Hertfordshire will be carried out.

The two announcements were made today by the East of England Strategic Health Authority and the Hertfordshire Primary Care Trust.

The PCT said while it supported the principle of centralising acute hospital services in east and north Hertfordshire on a single site, the Hatfield superhospital proposal was not financially viable.

Instead the trust will consider centralising at either the Lister in Stevenage or the Queen Elizabeth II (QEII) in Welwyn Garden City.

The trust's chairman, Richard Beazley, said: "Over the past three years, our staff - along with their colleagues elsewhere in the NHS and many from the community - have worked exceptionally hard to develop plans for the proposed new hospital in Hatfield.

"Today's news, therefore, will be greeted with disappointment by us all. However, we have to be realistic. Much has changed since July 2004 when the Hatfield project received the support of the then health secretary, Dr John Reid, with perhaps the biggest change being the highly challenged financial positions of virtually all the NHS organisations in Hertfordshire.

"The challenge facing the trust now is to accept the decision and to develop new proposals that will still allow us to deliver the vision set out in Investing in your Health - high-quality specialist acute services in modern facilities that allow our clinical staff to offer better and sustainable standards of care than is the case today."

News that the superhospital would be scrapped followed weeks of speculation about the project's future.

The superhospital, which would have been funded by private investors, had already been downgraded from £500 million to £300 million, and doubts had been voiced over the affordability of the specialist cancer centre.

The PCTs will now further work to test several options, prior public consultation starting in early 2007 on the future of hospital services across Hertfordshire.