Since writing it, I have found myself thinking about this from another perspective.
What must it actually feel like to work there?
Not to visit for an appointment or spend a few days on a ward, but to walk through those doors every morning and have done so through everything that hospital has endured.
Go back to 2013.
The QE was placed into special measures after the Care Quality Commission found serious failings.
There were concerns about staffing, training and systems for managing risks to patients.
Staff worked through it and by 2015 the hospital had improved sufficiently to emerge from that period of special measures.
Three years later the rug was pulled again.
In 2018 the Trust was rated Inadequate overall and went back into special measures.
Safety and leadership were rated Inadequate, although importantly the CQC still rated caring as Good.
That distinction matters to me.
There were serious problems with the organisation, but that should never be confused with suggesting that the nurses, doctors, healthcare assistants, porters, cleaners and countless others turning up every day did not care.
Quite the opposite.
They kept turning up.
Recruitment was difficult too.
At the time of the 2018 inspection there were significant nursing vacancies in parts of the hospital and a heavy reliance on bank and agency staff.
I have a member of my own family who works at the QE on the bank, and one of the advantages of bank work is choice.
You can decide whether you want to accept a shift.
In her case, sometimes she simply does not want to go back into an environment she finds depressing.
I would never pretend that she speaks for every bank worker at the hospital, because she does not, but it has made me think.
If someone has the choice whether to walk back through those doors, what makes them want to say yes?
Then came 2020 and Covid.
Imagine what that alone asked of NHS staff.
Fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, patients dying without their families beside them and staff putting themselves and their own families at risk while most of us were being told to stay safely at home.
At almost exactly the same time, the building around them started becoming another source of anxiety.
The extent of the RAAC problem became impossible to ignore and props began appearing around the hospital.
Then more followed, and eventually thousands of steel and timber supports were required to keep parts of the hospital safe.
Picture that working environment.
You are exhausted from Covid.
You have already lived through special measures twice.
Your hospital struggles to recruit and every day when you arrive at work you are physically reminded that even the building you are working in has reached the end of its life.
Yet again, the staff kept turning up.
In February 2022 the CQC finally recognised significant improvement.
The Trust moved up from its previous Inadequate rating and the regulator recommended that it leave the highest level of NHS recovery support.
Perhaps, finally, things were turning.
Then came the announcement staff had waited years to hear.
In May 2023 the Government confirmed that the QE would get a new hospital.
Not another temporary fix or another repair, but a new hospital, with the RAAC hospitals due to be replaced by 2030.
Imagine hearing that if you worked there.
After everything you had been through, suddenly there was a finishing line.
You could look at the props and think that they were temporary.
You could imagine modern wards, modern theatres, proper facilities and a hospital building worthy of both the people of West Norfolk and the people who work within it.
You could start believing that things really were going to get better.
Hope matters to a workforce.
Then the finishing line moved.
The timetable for the new QE shifted beyond 2030, with construction now expected to take the hospital into the early 2030s.
Once again staff were being asked to keep going, keep working beneath the props, keep dealing with the disruption and keep believing.
Build them up, then pull the rug away.
And now we arrive at 2026.
Just when staff might reasonably have thought the only remaining question was what their new hospital would look like, another uncertainty has appeared.
The Norfolk and Waveney University Hospitals Group is developing a new long term clinical strategy and considering how services should be provided across Norfolk and Waveney.
The QE has rightly stressed that no decisions have been made about the future configuration of services and that any significant proposals would require evidence, NHS governance, staff engagement and public consultation.
But imagine hearing that if you work there.
You have spent years waiting for a replacement hospital.
You have worked through regulatory failure, recruitment problems and Covid.
You have worked in a building held up by thousands of props and watched the date for your replacement hospital move.
Now you could be forgiven for wondering what services will actually be waiting for you when the new hospital finally opens.
That must take a toll.
We should be careful about claiming to know precisely what thousands of individual members of staff feel, but we can look at the evidence.
We know morale has been an issue.
We know recruitment and retention have been difficult.
We know some staff choose the flexibility of bank work.
We know the Trust itself has had to work incredibly hard to improve staff experience and rebuild confidence, and we know that uncertainty rarely helps anyone.
There is a danger when we discuss hospitals that everything becomes about structures, strategies, acronyms, business cases and buildings.
Behind every one of those things are people who have already given years of their working lives to keeping our hospital functioning, people who have repeatedly been asked for just a little more patience and people who deserve some certainty.
The people of West Norfolk desperately need a fully functioning district general hospital, but so do the people who work in it.
After everything those staff have been through, surely the least we owe them is a clear future to believe in.
Because you cannot keep building people up and then pulling the rug from underneath them.
Eventually they stop believing you, and some of them may simply decide not to come back through the door.