Scarborough Hospital's new Urgent and Emergency Care Centre to help relieve NHS pressures
It aims to treat patients and discharge them quicker and cope with demand easier
Last updated 26th Jan 2023
It is hoped Scarborough Hospital's new £47 million Urgent and Emergency Care Centre will alleviate pressures on the NHS.
It aims to treat patients and discharge them quicker than before as well as being able to cope with demand easier.
David Thomas, associate chief operating officer for the medical care group based in Scarborough, said: "The urgent and emergency care areas date back to around the 1980s and they were built at a time when we anticipated seeing in the region of around 20,000 patients coming into A&E every year, so we've got the opportunity to build a new centre that's fit for purpose to receive nearly 70,000 patients a year.
"We will use all of the resource in the hospital to give patients who are coming unannounced the best possible experience. If you're a patient and you come in, you will be treated in accordance with your acuity but you will have a very early up front assessment and hopefully we'd get you home in a much quicker timescale than we have in the past.
"By pooling our resources and getting our staff to work flexibly across all of the ground floor of our new building, we're certainly making it easier for our staff to be able to deal with what's coming at us certainly through the winter pressures and we're making it better for patients.
"We've had lots of infections, we've had the pandemic, flu, norovirus and all of those things. The new build is purposely designed to be able to deal with that particular pressure that the current infrastructure that we have was never designed to do, so it's a major improvement all round.
"We support quite a broad locality but we're remote. We're on the coast. We're over 40 miles away from any major hospital so we have to be able to support our patients. We are a major trauma unit and we can't always rely on a quick transfer so we have to have the skills and the capability at dealing with whatever patients' needs are."