Hospital aims to slash waiting times with 'emergency village'

Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust has received planning permission for a revamp of its casualty area at Scarborough Hospital.

Patients from Scarborough, Bridlington, Whitby and Ryedale who require emergency treatment will hopefully benefit from a streamlined service.

The project will help to speed up care by increasing nurse assessment facilities, bolstering the treatment of minor injuries and by providing better resuscitation room facilities.

The director of facilities, James Hayward, said: "Now that we have got planning permission it really is full steam ahead for this exciting project which will provide huge benefits to our patients and staff.

"The project has been signed off by our clinical teams and now that we have the green light to proceed, the next stage is to move on to the tender stage.

"Due to the nature of the department and the treatment that it provides, this project will be done in multiple phases to ensure that we can provide our patients with the best possible care whilst this improvement work takes place.

"The initial enabling works have already commenced, but now we have planning permission for the main new build we hope that work will commence in September and we aim to have the project delivered by January 2011.

"We ask that patients and visitors bear with us whilst we execute the work which will, when finished, see a massive improvement to our emergency care facilities."

NHS bosses gave the go-ahead, as part of a strategic review of services, for Scarborough to adopt what is known in the health service as the emergency village model.

This involves integrating A&E and associated departments and the way patients are dealt with will be streamlined, with better links between A&E and critical care.

At the moment, Scarborough has to see patients in four hours to meet national targets. But trust officials are hoping the better environment will allow nursing staff to treat people much more quickly.

An improved layout should create more areas for clinicians to work, rather than having patients sitting around waiting to be seen.

More staff could also be on duty, but it is too early to say how numbers might change because work rotas are still being looked at by managers.

A trust spokesman underlined that the main aim of the scheme was to improve the flow of patients and achieve a faster turnaround of cases, as well as visual improvements such as replacing a side room with a proper children's play area.

He added: "It will cut waiting times. It will mean that people that need to be seen by a doctor immediately will be seen. If you do not need to see a doctor you will be treated by a nurse or practitioner.

"There will be more bays and areas to treat and see people."

The emergency village model means that hospital staff can assess and treat patients quicker.

Scarborough's trust bosses have looked at how a large number of other hospitals operate before opting for the village model, which would benefit hundreds of patients every week.

The spokesman added that the hospital's A&E department deals with an average of about 100 patients during a 24-hour period.

The Scarborough department is also the only service of its size for miles around.

The unit at Bridlington Hospital is designed to deal with only minor injuries, while the nearest A&E units with similar capacity to Scarborough are in York, Hull or Middlesbrough.v