WORK has begun on a £3million project at Salisbury District Hospital - set to have a “massive effect” on staff and patients with around 80 per cent of the site involved.

The project, the biggest in a decade, will include the complete reconfiguration of surgery and medicine, and a new modular building on site for eye patients.

Hospital chiefs say the work - due to be finished by Christmas - is a direct response to the winter crisis which left hundreds of patients either having operations postponed or being cared for in escalation areas due to the demand on services.

At its peak in January, the health service triggered its most serious alert status as the hospital struggled to cope with unprecedented demand and was forced to close specialist areas such as endoscopy to provide extra beds for inpatients.

Andy Hyett, chief operating officer, said: “Having just experienced one of the most challenging winters in the NHS, we needed to sit back and look at what we needed to change to do things better in the future, that’s what we’ve done.

“We’ve brought two plans together and the result is that we will radically redesign our emergency pathways and facilities for inpatients coming into the hospital, and redesign our surgical pathways.

“There will be loads of reconfiguration and wards moving but at the end of the day we will have an additional medical ward, a bigger ambulatory care area and a new short stay surgical ward.”

Asking both staff and patients to “bear with us”, Mr Hyett warned it would be a “tough summer”.

“There will be a lot of changes going on and it’s going to be a bit confusing for people coming into hospital,” he said. “Departments are going to have moved and may be in a temporary location.

“There will be building work going on which can be disruptive and noisy but it’s so worthwhile - we have seen a lot of growth in medical emergencies coming in and in order to get ourselves ready for next winter, we have got to get our facilities where we want them.”

Hospital 'must adapt' to growing demand for elderly care

THE hospital is having to adapt in order to meet the needs of a growing number of older people with multiple health issues.

Over the winter period, the number of patients being referred by GP’s greatly increased with people requiring more clinical resources than ever before.

Clinical director for medicine Stuart Henderson said: “We have a relatively healthy, wealthy, rural population in our catchment area and while there are pockets of poorer, less healthy people, the challenges we face in Salisbury are very different to those in a city like Southampton and Portsmouth which has a poorer, younger and denser population.

“We are dealing with people often in their 80s and 90s with lots of health problems, they have been managing on their own in often rural environments but then become ill and need lots of resource.

“The trend that we have seen over the last five years peaked over the winter, demand far exceeded our capacity.”

Part of the reason involves issues surrounding care in the community. Surgical director Duncan Murray said: “This means more people come to us and it’s more difficult to discharge them to safe accommodation afterwards.”

 

New eye unit 

AS part of the plans a new eye unit is being built to look after the hospital’s 10,000 outpatients.

“At the moment the department layout is higgledy piggledy with patients having to go to different locations for tests,” says Duncan Murray, the hospital’s clinical director for surgery. 

“The new purpose-built unit has been designed by clinicians and will enable everything to be done in one place. 

“It will make a patient’s admission much more streamlined and shorter which is better for the patient and for us as it makes us more efficient and enables us to see more people.”

Factbox

  •  Around 26 new beds will be created on the Acute Medical Unit as a result of a reallocation of beds from surgical areas. 
  • As part of this, the ambulatory assessment area, currently four trolleys will be tripled to 12. 
  •  Eight specialties within acute medicine will see change: elderly medicine, diabetes, endocrine, the stroke unit, rehab elderly, acute elderly, oncology and haematology.
  •  Within surgery, the redesign will affect ophthalmology, general surgery, orthopaedics, and burns and plastics. 
  •  The stroke unit, currently on Farley ward will be moving into the hospital wing built in 2006.
  •  A new 23-bed short stay surgical unit will be created on Breamore ward. 
  •  The chemotherapy Pembroke suite, currently in a converted ward area, will move into a purpose-built area.
  •  A new 600 square metre eye unit will be in a modular build and will start turning up on lorries later this month 
  •  The redesign and new buildings will be fully up and running in December.
  •  Patients being admitted to A&E during the summer will not experience anything different and the AMU will still function as normal in the same place. 
  •  Patients coming in for planned appointments will receive further information in letters on the changes.
  • The hospital aims to reduce cancellations, increase the number of patients being looked after in the right place and increase the number of patients being seen