UNCERTAINTY over the environment and timescale this week scuppered plans to site Blaenau Gwent's proposed £28.5m community hospital on a redeveloped Corus Ebbw Vale site.

These were key factors in a decision by Blaenau Gwent Local Health Board (LHB) this week to go instead for land around the existing Ysbyty'r Tri Chwm as its preferred location for the showpiece hospital.

The situation was revealed by the Argus earlier this week. The council voted last year for the Corus complex as its preferred site for the new hospital, but health bosses have been unhappy with the plot allotted for the project on that site's regeneration masterplan.

Hospital project manager Karen Jones told the board the earmarked site was not acceptable for a number of reasons.

"We just felt there were so many unknowns about the environment and the timescale," she told the board.

"We are trying to create a rehabilitation environment for the benefit of the patients who will use the hospital, and landscaping will form a key part of that.

"We felt the Corus site could be a problem environmentally. The location offered (on the masterplan) is next to the railway line and the main road into the site.

"There was also no guarantee as to what development would take place around it. "The two other sites we considered offered better conditions in which to support a rehabilitation environment."

Those two other sites - Ysbyty'r Tri Chwm and the RTB playing fields at Hilltop, both also in Ebbw Vale - have been subject to site investigations and costings which included purchasing of land, highways provision and mineworkings.

Ysbyty'r Tri Chwm narrowly proved the best from a cost point of view, though figures have not been revealed.

This will now be written into the outline business plan as the preferred site. The Assembly has pledged to fund the hospital, which is the central plank of a major shake-up in hospital services in Blaenau Gwent.

It will have 111 beds, a range of outpatient, x-ray and therapy services, a minor injuries unit, and a GP and nurse-run facility.

There will be 32 general rehabilitation beds, 28 beds for recovering stroke patients, 25 sub-acute beds, 15 orthopaedic beds and 11 adult mental health beds.