‘VITAL’ plans to build a psychiatric intensive care facility for young people in Bournemouth are set to be refused by the council’s planning board.

Dorset HealthCare NHS trust’s scheme to build an eight-bed facility at its Herbert Hospital centre in Alumhurst Road has attracted more than 70 letters of objection.

Council planning officers have recommended councillors turn down the plans at a meeting on Monday, November 19, due to a number of reasons including the building’s ‘inappropriate design’, ‘excessive footprint’, and the loss of 15 protected trees.

As previously reported, Dorset Mental Health Forum’s operations director, Sarah Rose, said the provision of local beds was “vital”.

Last year 33 vulnerable children and adolescents had to be sent out of Dorset for treatment - in some cases as far away as Manchester - due to a lack of beds closer to home.

In a report to councillors, planning officer Charles Raven said while the need for the facility was “not in dispute”, the “scale and design of the building would have a significant adverse impact on the setting of the listed buildings, compounded by the extensive tree loss and a significant impact on highway safety”.

The one/two-storey building would effectively expand the Trust’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) inpatient unit, Pebble Lodge, which has been operating on the site since 2013.

In the planning application submitted by the trust in August, the proposed facility is described as “carefully designed to provide a high-quality appearance that will sit well in the site”.

As Mr Raven explains in his report, alternative sites for the building were considered and the only potential alternative site in Dorset is at Forston Clinic near Dorchester.

However, “the applicants contend that it is less accessible to the majority of the Dorset population and has historically been a more difficult to recruit to location”, Mr Raven said.

He added the existing Herbert Hospital CAMHS service would risk losing key staff if it were to move to Dorchester.

In his report, Mr Raven concludes: “It is acknowledged that the issue of mental health care provision is extremely emotive and can be contentious even on the most straightforward sites. In this instance, the development site is one of the most constrained sites within the Borough being a listed building, covered by tree preservation orders, and within an already at capacity highway network.”