South-west London's health infrastructure will be unaffordable in four years' time and, just a year later, the funding gap will have reached some £900m, NHS officials claim.

And poor preventative care as well as a lack of staff mean patients in the area are being failed, according to the group behind planned cuts and centralisation of acute services like maternity and A&E.

The claims were laid out in a presentation prepared for councillors across the region ahead of a scrutiny committee meeting next week.

The South West London Collaborative Commissioning review rose from the ashes of the failed Better Services, Better Value scheme and makes essentially the same case: that only by re-organising services into fewer, more specialised centres and moving certain types of care out of hospitals, can the crisis be solved.

Councils, hospitals and GPs are proposed to work even more closely together than they already do. In September the Comet reported that plans were afoot to merge Kingston Clinical Commissioning group into the council.

Surrey Comet:

The SWLCC presentation states: "The cost of delivering services is rising much faster than inflation due to rapidly increasing demand.

"This is creating a financial gap which will make current services unaffordable by 2020-21 if we do not make changes now.

"Our initial analysis suggested that if we do nothing, the financial gap in five years would be £900m."

When details of its plan leaked last month, a SWLCC spokesman said: "We need to develop services that keep people well and treat them as close to home as possible.

"To do this we need to transform services outside hospital, as well as considering how we provide even better care for those who need hospital care."

The team proposes to create 'locality teams' to care for defined populations of about 50,000 people, working with GPs to provide preventative care and to "support self-care".

Mental and physical healthcare should be integrated and new technologies, like 'virtual clinics' and apps, should be introduced, it said.

Key to the plans is the reorganisation of acute services—A&E, maternity, paediatrics, stroke services and emergency surgery—either by 'clinical networking' or "consolidating activity on a smaller number of sites".

No acute hospitals in south-west London are currently meeting all of the capital's quality standards, SWLCC said.

Kingston, Croydon, St George's, Epsom and St Helier hospitals are included in the review.