THE £8million bid to provide more beds at Worcestershire Royal Hospital has been approved by the Department for Health & Social Care.
Michelle McKay, chief executive of Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust received confirmation late this afternoon (Monday, June 4) and immediately declared it ‘good news’.
The cash will enable the Trust to accelerate the refurbishment of the Aconbury East Building at the Royal site, creating space for an extra 40 acute beds before winter.
The money is part of the £29.6million funding pot provided by the Government last year to enable the transformation of acute services in the county.
So far £3million of this money has been released to build a link bridge between the Royal and the Aconbury East building.
The Government has also approved a further application to draw down £5million to be spent on a number of emergency projects, including improving the safety of the Trust’s estate to enhance patient services.
The rest of the promised £29.6million is expected to be spent on upgrading maternity wards, theatres and children’s services at Worcestershire Royal, while the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch will get millions of pounds to pay for improvements to its elective care centre, endoscopy unit, children’s outpatients and an upgrade to its operating theatres.
The refurbishment of the Aconbury East building will go some way to easing the severe lack of beds on the Worcestershire Royal site.
This has affected the through-flow of patients, creating a bottleneck in Accident & Emergency where sometimes people admitted to the hospital have no onward bed or ward to go to because they are all full.
This has led to the hospital running at close to or at 100 per cent bed occupancy, patients being nursed in corridors and ambulances queuing up and waiting to take patients into the Emergency Department.
In a further move to ease the capacity situation Mrs McKay said that a surgical ward at the Alex Hospital had been reconfigured for medical admissions, further easing pressure on Accident & Emergency.
