da Vinci facility is state-of-the-art

 The two theatres, together with accompanying “preparation” and scrub facilities, and a separate five-bed recovery bay to serve several of the hospital’s eight other existing main theatres, were completed to time and on budget recently by modular construction specialist, MTX Contracts, under a £2 million design and build contract, as HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.

Located close to the centre of Wolverhampton on a 24-hectare site, the New Cross Hospital is the largest acute healthcare facility run by the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust. Offering a comprehensive range of healthcare services to the people of Wolverhampton, the wider Black Country, Staffordshire, North Worcestershire, and Shropshire, the facility is the Black Country’s largest teaching hospital, and provides training to around 130 medical students on rotation from the University of Birmingham Medical School. It also trains nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals, via well-established links with the University of Wolverhampton. The Trust, meanwhile, has an operating budget of £363 million, some 650 beds, and a staff of around 6,700. The hospital has 17 theatres, including a number, for specialist disciplines such as eye surgery and cardiothoracics, in proximity to, but not actually located within, the main complex. Prior to MTX’s completion of the new twin operating theatres – which are located close to the existing main theatres (numbers 3-10) at the heart of the main complex – pressure on surgical facilities had grown to the extent that additional capacity had become essential. Consequently, in early 2010, a team headed by Marion Washer, the Trust’s directorate manager for critical care services, and her colleague, Ian Bowen, speciality lead for general, urology, and vascular theatres, was tasked with producing a formal business case for a new twin-theatre suite and ancillary accommodation.

Pressure for extra capacity