A REPORT into the state of Roseberry Park Hospital will have to undergo legal checks before it can be published.

The mental health facility in Middlesbrough has been dogged by structural defects with its roof, plumbing and fire safety system.

Its travails provoked a “task force” to be formed by the Tees Valley Health Scrutiny Committee to look at what went wrong and how patients had been affected.

But the latest committee meeting heard the final findings would need to be checked by legal experts before it goes to press.

Redcar and Cleveland Cllr Ian Jeffrey said: “All of us who engaged with the process were impressed with the dedication of the staff involved in the process. Generally, carers, workers and patients were satisfied with the level of care they receiving under the circumstances.”

The hospital, which was built in 2011, is now fully run by the Tees Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV).

It was the subject of a long legal dispute over efforts to end the trust’s £321m PFI contract with Three Valleys Healthcare Limited (TVH).

The trust took over services from TVH in June after the firm went into liquidation and the PFI contract was officially terminated at the end of September.

The state of Roseberry Park meant as many as 50 patients had to be transferred to Hartlepool in 2017 due to problems with the building.

Cllr Jeffrey lashed out at the quality of the infrastructure he’d seen at the mental health facility.

He added: “I think when some of us went on a visit to look at the buildings and the absolutely shoddy work that they’ve been constructed with – it was clear a lot of work needed to be done over a several years to bring the situation back where it should have been in the first place. So all due respect to the staff to the staff working in those conditions.”

A new car park has now been finished at the hospital site and planning permission for a new 28-bed ward was secured earlier this year.

TEWV chief executive Colin Martin gave an update in October hoping “rectification work” to problems with two buildings would start in February 2019 with a contractor signed up to do it by the end of this year.

But a spokesperson from the trust said the process to secure a contractor was still going on.