With an increasing number of NHS Trusts and Health Boards now incorporating single-bed en suite patient bedroom design into their hospitals, but with the protagonists and opponents no nearer to settling their differences on this form of accommodation, a presentation at this NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership Facilities Services (formerly Welsh Health Estates) conference in Cardiff on the experiences of staff, patients, and visitors, at Wales’s first 100% single-bed hospital, the Ysbyty Aneurin Bevan in Ebbw Vale, based on analysis and feedback from its first year in operation, provided some interesting data and conclusions.
HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
The joint presentation, given at an event in late April supported by IHEEM’s Welsh branch, focused both on the business case and background to the construction of the new 96-bed rehabilitation and ‘sub-acute’ hospital in Ebbw Vale, and on the reasons that it was decided it should be 100% single-bed. The second ‘half’ of the address described the experiences of patients, staff, and visitors, since the facility opened in December 2010. The presentation was given jointly by Judith Paget, director of Planning and Operation, and deputy CEO, at the Aneurin Bevan Health Board, looking at the former elements, and Bobby Bolt, Blaenau Gwent locality director at the Health Board, examining the latter. Speaking first, Judith Paget explained that the Ysbyty Aneurin Bevan Hospital, which was named after the NHS’s founder Aneurin Bevan, who hailed from nearby Tredegar, is located at the base of a large valley about a mile outside Ebbw Vale, at the centre of a former large Corus steelworks. Re-named The Works Regeneration Site, the 200-acre site is currently being redeveloped by Blaenau Gwent Council and local businesses and enterprise. The new hospital, which was completed by BAM Construction in September 2010 as part of Phase 1 of the Designed for Life: Building for Wales Framework (HEJ – January 2008), is thus gradually being joined by a variety of new leisure, office, and retail facilities. (BAM has also subsequently completed, under the same Welsh Government-backed construction framework, the 269-bed Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr in Caerphilly, another 100% single-bed hospital, which was officially opened in March this year by Wales’s Minister for Health and Social Services, Lesley Griffiths AM, who also spoke at the Cardiff conference).
‘Zig-zag’ configuration
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