Details of new £16m hospital building revealed

Details have been revealed of a planned new Hereford County Hospital building intended to help clear the county’s surgery backlog.

Lying to the rear of the hospital, the new £16.5 million “elective surgical hub” will replace two 1940s “hutted” wards.

These “have well-outlasted their welcome and will be demolished in the coming months”, Wye Valley NHS Trust chief executive Glen Burley said last month.

According to a design document submitted with the planning application for the building, Herefordshire’s “backlog of elective [non-urgent] care procedures is very high and measured in years rather than days of waiting”.

“The new Elective Surgical Hub helps to address some of this backlog with purpose-built facilities focused on elective procedures on an efficient basis,” it says.

The single-storey facility is arranged around flow of day patients, and is “future proofed to allow flow and clinical models to work robustly in a pandemic”, it explains.

It will have two operating theatre suites with pre- and post-operative rooms, as well as a dedicated ophthalmic suite for treating cataracts, and staff facilities. A plant room will occupy a smaller first floor.

Sitting between sit between the current two-storey Macmillan Renton Unit and a planned new four-storey inpatient unit, the building will face the rear of houses along Union Walk.

The money comes from a successful bid by the trust to the £2-billion Elective Recovery Fund for the NHS.