New multi-million pound Emergency Department on course for opening next spring
Work on a new Emergency Department (ED) at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital (GRH) costing £17.3m remains on course for a spring opening next year.
Once complete the new building will include 23 major patient cubicles, seven triage rooms, six minors treatment rooms, six paediatric rooms, dedicated patient bays, specialist rooms for mental health and a fracture and orthopaedics unit with additional clinical rooms.
Contractors Kiers have built two new extensions onto the existing ED which will open in the autumn enabling work on re-designing the existing department to start ready for next year.
The building works are part of a much wider £100m-plus programme of investment to establish centres of excellence across Gloucestershire Royal Hospital (GRH) and Cheltenham General Hospital (CGH). Work started last year (2021) and has already seen a new £6.5m radiology department re-open at CGH, a new £1m Medical Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) unit open at GRH and the opening of a new ward, Gallery Ward 2, at a cost of £4.5m, also at GRH, earlier this month (August).
Dr Helen Mansfield, ED Consultant, said: “Once complete these new facilities will provide a purpose-built environment where we will be able to provide high quality care for our patients. For example, our resuscitation area, where we treat our sickest patients, will double in size enabling us to flow through our patients much more effectively.
“Under the development we will also be providing specialised areas for patients in a mental health crisis. We know that when patients are having a crisis, they benefit from being in the right environment. Having more secluded and private rooms will support this.”
The work at GRH’s ED is part of a wider programme to provide the next generation of care in line with our vision for two centres of excellence at our Cheltenham and Gloucester sites.
Professor Mark Pietroni, Medical Director and Interim Chief Executive Officer
Mark Pietroni continues with “We are happy with the progress to date across both sites and when this programme is completed it will bring with it many benefits for patients as well as staff. In terms of ED it will mean that patients flow through the department more smoothly, helping to ease some of the pressures with queuing ambulances and long waits, although it is important to stress that it won’t resolve these issues. The root causes are deeper and we will continue to work closely with our teams and system partners on improving the situation.”