Go-ahead tipped for £21m medical school

The go-ahead for a £21m new medical school building at the University of Lincoln could be granted next week after the plans were recommended for approval.The university is seeking permission from City of Lincoln Council for a five-storey building which will comprise lecture theatres, laboratories, clinical and prosection anatomy suites equipped with cutting-edge diagnostic tools, and a dedicated science library.The council’s planning committee will make a final decision on the application at a meeting on Wednesday 27 March.If the green light is give, the building will be constructed next to the current science laboratories, the Janet Lane-Claypon Building, and opposite the university’s Isaac Newton Building on the southern edge of the main Brayford Pool Campus.The site already has outline planning permission under an existing masterplan with the first artist’s impressions of the planned building revealed last summer.Facilities would include a clinical skills suite with mock consultation rooms, simulating hospital wards or a GP surgery and the building is scheduled for completion in spring 2021.The University of Lincoln and University of Nottingham confirmed in March 2018 they had been successful in their joint bid to establish a new medical school for Lincolnshire.It followed an announcement in 2017 by the government of an additional 1,500 medical school training places across England to ease staffing shortages in the NHS.