New emergency care centre set to open

A new £47m Urgent and Emergency Care Centre (UECC) at Scarborough Hospital will open its doors to A&E patients on Thursday.

The facility brings the emergency department under the same roof as critical care and enhanced care, while vital diagnostics like CT scans are also on site.

It has taken three years to build the new centre, which has a space for urgent and emergency care that is almost a third larger than the existing facilities.

Dr Ed Smith, who led the development on behalf of York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said it would make a "significant difference" to patients.

When the existing A&E opened in 1985 it dealt with about 15,000 patients each year - but that has since grown to about 70,000.

Dr Smith said it had become "very congested" and was "no longer fit for purpose".

The UECC has been designed to treat patients more efficiently by having the right experts and state-of-the art equipment in one location.

"We want to care for patients in dignified locations, not in corridors or queues on corridors, and we think that this new estate will allow us to do that," Dr Smith said.

"It won't be perfect because patients will still arrive in large numbers at particular times of the day and the week - but we think it will make a big difference."

The two-storey building has 3,120 square metres of space on each floor - with urgent and emergency care at ground level and a 26-bed facility for critical and enhanced care above it.

Dr Smith said it would "transform" the way patients were managed, with clinicians able to make quicker decisions about treatment.

"We want to keep patients out of hospital where we can, but when we need to get them into hospital we need to do that quickly and efficiently with the minimum of fuss and queueing and waiting," he said.

"So, that's what we think we're going to be able to deliver with this estate."

The centre opens to A&E patients at 08:00 BST on Thursday as part of a phased opening of services across the week.

The UECC had been expected to open last autumn but that had to be delayed due to a faulty boiler.

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