The Governement of Scotland, through the Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, has approved a funding package to finance new hospitals and health centres around the country.

The £409 million (US$653 million) hospitals funding package involves investment in PPP projects that will be developed on a design, build, finance and maintain (DBFM) basis.

The main beneficiary of this plan is the Royal Edinburgh Hospital Campus, given that its redevelopment project will have a total investment of £120 million (US$192 million). Other projects that are included in the funding package are the following:

• £90 million to develop Aberdeen Women's Hospital
• £65 million East Lothian Community Hospital
• £20 million for the new Aberdeen Cancer Centre
• £20 million community health projects in Highland including Skye, Lochalsh, south west Ross-shire and in Badenoch and Strathspey
• £19 million for primary care in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
• £19 million primary care projects in Grampian including Newmachar, Balmedie Blackburn and Elsick

All the investments will be secured through a £1 billion extension to the Non Profit Distributing (NPD) programme. The programme, which has been set up by the government to support infrastructure investment in Scotland, has been recently extended to 2019-2020.

Ms Sturgeon said:

These health projects will provide state-of-the-art facilities to care for thousands of patients across Scotland.

This £409 million investment will deliver the highest quality of health and social care services. This government's vision is to deliver world-leading safe, effective and person-centred healthcare.

Today's announcement demonstrates that, despite the massive cuts to Scotland's capital budget from Westminster, the Scottish Government will continue to deliver substantial investment in the infrastructure of the NHS through use of the innovative NPD model and the Hub programme.

Barry White, chief executive of the Scottish Futures Trust, said:

This massive investment in healthcare will deliver first-class, well designed buildings to support local healthcare and create thousands of jobs across Scotland. The SFT-managed £3.5bn NPD programme stands as one of the largest infrastructure investment programme of its type across Europe.