A new £24m day surgery centre at Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital will open in June, health bosses say.
But delays to the new state-of-the-art elective surgery hub, originally meant to open in 2023, have led to staff finding jobs elsewhere while waiting for the unit to come on line.
The new facility, which SaTH say will reduce the number of operations that have to be cancelled due to emergency pressures, is now set to be handed over by contractors in May, a meeting of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust was told.
The first patients are now expected to be admitted to the hub on June 10.
“We have got a recruitment challenge at the PRH, we seem to be losing a lot of people to other organisations,” said Acting Chief Operating Officer Sara Biffen.
“We’ve had delays with the elective hub for a variety of reasons so people have gone elsewhere because the elective hub has not opened.
“It will open on June 10th when the first patients go through, we’re just in that process of ensuring all systems and processes [are ready] but it will be completed and handed over to us on the 24th of May.”
The hospital trust which runs the PRH announced in 2022 that it had secured £10 million of Government funding to help build the facility.
Despite the staff retention problems, the meeting of the trust board on March 14 was told that plans were in place to ensure the unit was fully staffed by the time it opens.
“Mitigation is that we’ve been in-sourcing from a company called 18 weeks, we’re just doing a tender exercise now about how we do that for 24/25 to support us with that delivery,” added Ms Biffen.
“There’s still further work to do but there are actions in place to ensure that we’ve got the level of capacity available to us whether it’s provided to us by in-sourcing or by our own teams – we’ve got a full action plan.
“It will be a ring-fenced 24 beds, so it will be a really modern way of operating -it won’t be escalated into through A&E pressures so that will be an attraction.”
Once opened, the hub will support day case procedures across a range of specialities including ear, nose and throat, maxillofacial, gynaecology, breast, orthopaedics and general surgery.
The development forms part of a planned reconfiguration of services across the county which will see the Princess Royal become a specialist planned care site.
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