Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust hopes to complete work on its new £20million building which will house new surgical theaters by August – and it has now shared images showing what the new wards are expected to look like.
The idea is that the Freeman’s new one-story building – which was ramped up this year – will house four new operating theaters and allow doctors to perform thousands more procedures. This will allow the trust to move “thousands of day case procedures” from existing hospital buildings and free up space for more complex operations.
The trust says the new building will help it reduce long waiting lists for certain surgical specialties and tackle its backlog of elective procedures exacerbated by Covid. There are currently over 90,000 people awaiting elective treatment in Newcastle.
Read more: Newcastle hospitals were ‘busiest in the country’ in January amid push to cut huge waiting lists
Images now show what areas such as the new building reception and pre-op bays will look like once the project is complete. With an August completion date, hospital bosses said after that it would start in a few weeks. Artist impressions of new recovery areas and state-of-the-art theaters were also shared.
In addition to the new theaters, there will be a day case assessment area and a recovery area. Leaders said the new building would see some musculoskeletal, urology, cardiothoracic and some general surgery departments relocated. The latest NHS figures showed Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust was the busiest in the country in January – with more than 4,000 elective patients.
(Image: Newcastle Hospitals)
Online, the trust said: “The Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the NHS and our services in Newcastle hospitals and we are now faced with a situation where many patients have been waiting for months for their scheduled surgery. , which is not the case. It is also clear that the pressure on our emergency care services is not diminishing and that we continue to see many patients who need urgent care and treatment, which which still has an impact on our waiting lists.
“To try and meet these challenges, we’ve embarked on this accelerated project that will allow us to perform thousands more low-complexity procedures, which is good news for patients.”
Earlier this month, the hospital trust’s chief executive, Dame Jackie Daniel, said: “The circumstances that have converged to create our pressures are not something we control, but we are responding positively to them.
“We invest in the workforce and in the things that matter to us – better facilities, more flexible working, investment in our field to improve the working environment and investment in staff teams (without impact on existing services) with a recruitment campaign of around to get underway for the Freeman Hospital day treatment center which will open later this year.”
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