Huge project to inject new life into New Cross Hospital

A new unit and an extension to the A&E unit have both recently been completed. Both have been added in a bid to help ease one of the biggest challenges that has faced staff there this year – pressure on its A&E department, which has seen record numbers of people coming through its doors.

The hospital has faced a battle to keep up with this demand, and even bosses have said the department is not fit for purpose.

When the A&E opened in 1996, around 70,000 patients came through its doors a year. This has rocketed to 107,000 for 2012/13. But bosses are determined to keep up with a changing face of the hospital to make sure its future is a bright one.

A £500,000 Clinical Decisions Unit (CDU), where patients in the hospital's under-pressure A&E department can wait to receive treatment and results for relatively minor injuries, opened in September.

And just last week a £2.5m extension of A&E – which more than doubled the amount of beds in the unit – finally opened to free up space in the waiting room.

Plans are moving forward for a £28m A&E in 2015, with the business case for the huge department – four times the size of the current one – recently approved by chiefs. And a £4m, 500-space, multi-storey car park is currently being constructed near to the hospital's Wolverhampton Medical Institute. It will open next February in a bid to cope with increasing visitor numbers.

In March a new £16m pathology building – which bosses claimed was better than anything of its kind in Europe – was unveiled.

What with an £8m extension of the hospital's maternity unit also in the pipeline to cope with extra patients from the planned stripping of services from Stafford Hospital, New Cross is a forever changing landscape.

The trust is even overseeing building work outside the city, with a major refurbishment of Cannock Chase Hospital also being proposed – which the trust would then run.

Mike Goodwin, head of estates development, said it was an exciting time at the trust. He said: "Over the past year the big project has been pathology which was a big success – it's bedding down very well now and is producing all the benefits we thought it would.

"The car park is due for completion in February and we've got the A&E extension that will give us capacity to cope until the new Emergency Department will be complete in November 2015. We're also taking down a number of the older buildings which were redundant.

"Basically we've been clearing the site – we're trying to get rid of some of our older stock.

"In time we're very focused on making sure we do carry through the master plan that was prepared for the PFI project around 2004 to 2008. We haven't got that sort of money – it was a three-to-five year plan to renovate the hospital and we're sticking to that plan but at a slower pace and to what we can afford."

Cancer linear accelerators – worth £3m each – are also being gradually introduced. But the most pressing project for the trust is the new £28m A&E unit, which will help ease pressure on staff after a difficult 12 months in which patient numbers have increased dramatically.

The current A&E unit has been labelled as 'unfit for purpose' by the hospital's chief executive David Loughton. It is seeing 40,000 more patients a year than it was designed to cope with, and staff have regularly been forced to treat patients in corridors.

The new three-storey A&E building will house a separate satellite radiology department, a clinical decisions unit, an outpatients clinic and a new integrated primary care facility, as well as the emergency department and will directly link with the hospital's Heart and Lung Centre.

Mr Goodwin said: "Once the Emergency Department is done we'll be looking at in-patients beds and refurbishing the outpatients department, in four to six years time. Everything's in hand and we're comfortable as to where we are."