Critical care centre maybe delayed (From Campaign Series)

Critical care centre maybe delayed

4:30pm Tuesday 22nd December 2009 in News

THE proposed Specialist and Critical Care Centre to treat Gwent's sickest patients may not be fully finished until 2025 - more than a decade after its original planned completion date.

Health bosses are considering phasing the building programme over 10-15 years and planning could be restarted in January after being suspended for all of 2009.

Health bosses in Gwent originally hoped the whole centre, with a price tag of around £300 million, would be ready by 2014.

But with recession hitting Assembly budgets, last December, health minister Edwina Hart ordered that planning work on the Specialist and Critical Care Centre (SCCC) be halted.

The Argus revealed last month that the Assembly had asked the Aneurin Bevan Health Board to look at restarting the planning process, with phased development as an option.

A board report posits a 10-15 year development period, though the exact timescale depends ensuring that existing facilities and services, and those provided in each phase of the new centre, are sustainable.

The cost of the SCCC has posed a headache for NHS planners at health board and Assembly level, and with budgets for NHS building projects in Wales oversubscribed, phasing the development will spread the cost over a longer period.

There were also concerns raised when planning was suspended last year, over whether plans to boost primary and community care services in the area were robust enough to cope with an overall reduction of several hundred hospital beds across Gwent.

The extra time will enable the health board to develop such services.

The aim is to seek Assembly approval and financial support next month for a six-nine month planning period, during 2010, to enable a start to be made on whatever will be the first phase. The centre is earmarked for land on and around the existing Llanfrechfa Grange Hospital site.

It will have 450-500 beds and provide for major and immediately life threatening emergencies, complex surgery, intensive care, consultant-led obstetric care, and children's inpatient care.

Currently, these services are provided mainly at the Royal Gwent and Nevill Hall Hospitals, and the board will have to maintain these sites while the SCCC is developed.