New £87m surgical centre hopes to cut waiting lists

A new £87m surgical centre has opened at a Somerset hospital, with NHS leaders hoping it will reduce waiting lists by increasing capacity and improving patient flow.

The King's Building at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton brings operating theatres, endoscopy, admissions and intensive care together under one roof. Somerset NHS Foundation Trust said it was a major transformation of surgical care.

The centre includes eight operating theatres, up from five, six endoscopy rooms and a 22-bed intensive care unit.

Dr Helen Hopwood said it offered a "double bonus" of increased capacity and efficiency, allowing more procedures and reducing the need for patients to move around the hospital.

"We've got two bonuses here. One is that we've increased our capacity, so we have additional operating theatre sessions that we can offer. But also we can improve the efficiency because we are now able to offer surgical pathways that run end to end within one clinical area," said Hopwood, consultant anaesthetist and associate medical director for surgery.

The building's opening also replaces clinical areas housed in some of the oldest parts of the hospital estate.

Hopwood said the previous intensive care unit was located in buildings dating back to World War Two.

"Our previous intensive care is in the oldest part of our building, built in the 1940s, and one of the lovely things about having this new building is that we've designed it around our modern pathways and our modern practices," she said.

"Most obviously, we're using a building that wasn't designed in any way for the way that we currently use it."

The new intensive care unit has increased capacity from 16 to 22 beds, and includes single ensuite rooms, improved visitor areas and outdoor space for patients recovering from lengthy stays.

"We've got these lovely light, airy rooms... We can take patients out onto the balcony so that they can be outside, which is particularly important for our patients who have longer stays in intensive care who need to feel human and connected," Hopwood said.

Consultant gastroenterologist Emma Wesley, who helped design the centre, said patient dignity and privacy had been central to its development.

"When we were doing the design, we were making every decision with the patient's best interests at the front of our minds- what would be the best experience for our patients when they came here?" she said.

She said thenew endoscopy unit includes private changing facilities and consultation rooms rather than relying on curtained areas.

"We've designed it so that everyone's got lots of privacy, places to get changed, places to have their health information taken, just on a one-to-one basis in a proper room rather than just behind a curtain," she said.

Wesley added: "I think it's going to be an absolutely lovely place to work and really one of the nicest endoscopy units in the UK."

One of the centre's flagship facilities is a hybrid operating theatre, combining surgery and advanced imaging technology in the same room.

Consultant vascular surgeon Natasha Chinai said it would allow patients needing complex procedures to have them carried out under a single anaesthetic, rather than attending different hospital departments on separate occasions.

"This allows us to deliver a much better patient journey," she said.

"We're under one anaesthetic, one procedure, we can deliver all of it, the image-guided part of the intervention as well as the open surgery, so it's much more seamless and patient experience improves."

The trust said the new centre had been designed to support future developments, including robotic-assisted surgery, as demand for healthcare services continues to grow across Somerset.

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