Women and Children’s Hospital Programme Update

Work to progress the Women and Children’s Hospital Programme continues at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust.

Our scheme is part of the national New Hospitals Programme’s early Cohort 2, and we remain confident that our new Women and Children’s Hospital is on track to completion following the Government’s recent announcement to review and develop a “thorough, realistic and costed timetable for delivery”.

Yesterday, RCHT opened the Gravel Pit Car Park extension which is a major enabling scheme to the overall programme. It re-provides 176 parking spaces that have been or will be lost when the main building programme starts.

Other enabling schemes are well underway or have been completed:

• The Penventinnie Lane houses were demolished in April 2023 to create the constructor’s site compound.
• Our goods-inbound function (where we receive our supplies) is being relocated to an off-site warehouse, with a just-in-time delivery service to the Royal Cornwall Hospital site. The warehouse is currently being fitted out and will be operational from early 2025.
• The cardiac outpatient department relocation project is underway to move the service out of the Link Corridor (i.e. the footprint of the new hospital). This project will complete in May 2025.
• Construction on a new pathology building is due to start in December 2024. This is the largest enabling scheme by value. The new pathology building will enable our blood sciences laboratories to relocate out of the footprint of our new hospital as well as relocate our microbiology service from a building that is no longer fit for purpose
• Work starts this autumn (2024) to move one of our large oxygen tanks (known as a Vacuum Insulated Evaporator or VIE) out of the new Women and Children’s Hospital footprint.
• We’re upgrading our critical electrical infrastructure on site at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. This scheme is essential to support all future developments requiring an additional electrical load, as well as the ongoing electrical resilience for the RCH site up to 2050. Work is expected to complete in 2026.

For more information about our building programme, please visit the ‘Our Building Programme’ page.

You can watch the flythrough of our new Women and Children’s Hospital on Vimeo.