With substantial capital funding for new build NHS healthcare facilities increasingly scarce, many Trusts are now focusing ever harder on maximising use of existing space, and, where it is not being effectively used, on converting it for new or alternative clinical and non-clinical use.
In an excellent example of how an existing under-utilised building can be cost-effectively refurbished to provide valuable new facilities that improve patient care and meet growing demand, the Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh (WWL) NHS Foundation Trust in north-west England recently converted a run-down, partly deserted, 1970s building to create a new diagnostic and treatment centre. The impressive facility combines women’s healthcare services, urology and gastroenterology diagnosis and treatment, and a state-of-the-art endoscope reprocessing facilities, under one roof. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie reports.
The largest clinical services building development to have taken place within the WWL NHS Foundation Trust for the past decade, the new £6.8 m Hanover Diagnostic and Treatment Centre at Leigh Infirmary, so called because it is situated in the town’s Hanover Road, opened in May this year. Among the facilities incorporated are a modern, well-equipped endoscope reprocessing department on one ‘half’ of the ground floor, a women’s services department on the other ‘half’ offering procedures such as colposcopy, hysteroscopy, and female sterilisation, a new first floor urology department, and a gastroenterology diagnostic and treatment department, now known as the Leigh Endoscopy Unit, on the second floor. The conversion of a building that had formerly accommodated a stroke ward, and physiotherapy and audiology services, but the top (second) floor of which had been vacant for the previous three years – since the re-location of a stroke unit formerly housed within it to the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary six miles away in Wigan – to a modern Diagnostic and Treatment Centre, took just over nine months. Construction and conversion work began in June 2012, and was completed in mid-March 2013, with the first patients treated in early May this year. The existing Hanover Block’s conversion is part of a £70 million Trust Service and Site Investment programme which got under way in early 2011, and also includes (ongoing) improvements to both the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary, and the nearby Wrightington Hospital. The principal contractor on the Hanover Block scheme, Widnes-based Whitfield & Brown, a North West England-based principal contractor, that has operated in the health sector since 1972, worked closely throughout with a multi-disciplinary project team. This included clinicians, nursing staff, endoscopists, surgeons specialising in both urology and gastroenterology, and representatives from the scheme architects, IBI Taylor Young.
Multidisciplinary ‘buy-in’
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