NHS Shetland buys Kveldsro Hotel to provide staff accommodation
THE KVELDSRO Hotel in Lerwick is set to become home to healthcare workers after NHS Shetland agreed to buy the building.
Eighteen beds will be provided to NHS staff, in a bid to help the health board as it grapples with a lack of housing in the isles.
NHS Shetland had considered refurbishing its nursing accommodation at Montfield, but has decided that purchasing and renovating the Kveldsro – which has been closed for a number of years – is more cost-effective.
All going well, the NHS expects workers to be moving into the Kveldsro in the autumn.
Head of estates David Wagstaff said that finding accommodation was a “huge issue for ourselves in attracting and keeping staff”.
He believes that buying the Kveldsro – which has been entirely funded by outside sources – is a “no-brainer” for NHS Shetland.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work over the last year or two on accommodation,” he told Shetland News.
“We were looking at potentially refurbishing Montfield nursing accommodation. They’re dated, and not up to modern standards.
“As we started on the project it soon became clear the cost of refurbishment was going to be substantial.”
NHS Shetland had been in talks to lease the Kveldsro Hotel for up to a year to house nursing staff while the Montfield block was being refurbished.
However Wagstaff said the hotel’s owners Brudolff Group then told them they were looking to sell the building, which did not re-open after the Covid pandemic.
“We looked at it and it was far more cost effective for us to purchase the Kveldsro and do the bits we needed to it,” he added.
NHS Education for Scotland had agreed to fund the Montfield refurbishments, and when NHS Shetland pivoted to the Kveldsro idea they also agreed to finance that.
The money, allocated through the Scottish Government, is expected to total around £1.2 million for the purchase and refurbishment of the Kveldsro.
Wagstaff said they had to rush the sale through by the 31 March financial year deadline, adding it was “all hands to the pump to get it over the line”.
He said they would “absolutely not” have been able to buy the former hotel if it was not for the outside funding.
“We were 100 per cent reliant on them giving us that capital funding, we didn’t have that funding ourselves,” he added.
Health workers coming to live and work in Shetland continue to struggle to find somewhere to live, Wagstaff said, which is an issue the NHS is grappling with.
He said they knew from conversations with students that the “clinical experience they get here is very, very good”.
“We get a lot of interest in returning back to Shetland to work,” he said.
“High quality accommodation is absolutely crucial to us in terms of long-term recruitment.”
In the short to medium-term, NHS Shetland will continue to use both Montfield and the Kveldsro to house staff.
However Wagstaff said these were single-person accommodation, which was not always what they needed.
“Family accommodation is what we really need to increase. When people move to Shetland that’s what they’re struggling to find,” he said.
“We’re always struggling for accommodation, but we’re not always struggling for single person accommodation.”
He hopes that they will be able to carry out a “less invasive refurbishment” of Montfield somewhere down the line.
But he added that, in the long term, it “might not be the type of accommodation we need”.
Wagstaff praised the Kveldsro, which he said was “an old building” but still “good quality”.
“The previous owners had done quite a bit of work, they’ve put in all new bathrooms,” he said.
“It’s all double rooms and en-suite bathrooms, so it’s good quality accommodation.
“It’s just minor bits of repairs that are needed, and some internal changes.”
NHS Shetland hopes to change some of the spaces to provide study and communal space for staff, as well as modifying the “big, commercial kitchen” into something more fitting.
The health board will also add a new accessible flat to the ground floor of the building. “It’s important that we’re able to offer that,” Wagstaff said.
“There’s no lift in the building, and the building doesn’t really lend itself to a lift either.”
Wagstaff stressed that the work will “depend on contractor availability” in the isles.
“We’ll probably split it up into little packages of work rather than one big contract.
“If we can break it down then hopefully we can get people in quicker. The hope is we can get the first people in in the autumn.”
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