Delivering outstanding care environments for patients and staff

As work continues behind the scenes to deliver the full business case for the new Women and Children’s Hospital, we thought it would be interesting to highlight the transformational benefits this new hospital will deliver to the people of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

All NHS building projects must show major benefits in their business cases in order to secure funding. This is called benefits realisation. The new Women and Children’s Hospital is Cornwall’s biggest ever healthcare infrastructure investment, which is why it’s really important it truly delivers on the promise for our staff and patients.

As a rule of thumb, for every £1 spent, a new building is expected to deliver at least £4 of financial or non-financial equivalent benefits throughout its lifetime (which is calculated around 60 years). This can include bringing related services together to increase efficiency, through to reducing rising costs associated with backlog maintenance on old buildings. And a lot in between. 

While it is a challenge to quantify all the benefits our new Women and Children’s Hospital will deliver in a short article, at the heart of the scheme is a desire to create an outstanding, state-of-the-art environment and better experiences for both patients and staff.  

Better together

Our patients will undoubtedly benefit when we bring our women and children’s services together into one location – including those from maternity services and paediatrics to obstetrics and gynaecology.

Our women and children’s services are currently scattered across the Royal Cornwall Hospital site, making them relatively operationally inefficient. By having our services closer together, we can make some dramatic changes to the patient experience including faster diagnoses, quicker transfer times (especially for those patients who do not need to be admitted), fewer admissions and earlier discharges, and less duplication of work as the clinical resources will be together in a single space.  

The clever design of the new hospital delivers a familiar layout of repeatable rooms, with less noise, energy efficiencies and pleasant surroundings that will be constructed using modern, sustainable methods. Digital technologies will future proof the building and ensure the maintenance over its lifespan is easily mapped and tracked using building information modelling (BIM), and that we quickly and easily adopt and adapt to new systems and smart tools, such as silent call bells and digital wayfinding.

Some highlights

One of the biggest benefits we will see are the co-location of theatres meaning in the case of emergencies, patients can be transferred quickly, supporting better patient outcomes and experience. There will also be two state-of-the-art obstetric theatres.

There will be bigger family rooms with private facilities in the maternity unit, bringing parents and babies together in a nurturing environment nearly all of the time. Data suggests parents who stay close to their babies experience less anxiety and grow in confidence; their babies gain weight quicker, and they all get home much sooner.

Paediatric Outpatients and the Paediatric Assessment Unit will be streamlined to reduce the amount of time patients spend in hospital, lowering anxieties and their length of stay. Teenage children and young adults will be cared for separately to younger patients to meet their particular needs–whilst clinicians will be based together to make efficient  use of their time.

The new hospital will bring together all our gynaecology services, as the inpatient and outpatient areas, alongside dedicated operating theatres, are collocated into a single building. This will streamline working processes and enable clinical teams to work more efficiently. Collocating the Emergency Gynaecology and Early Pregnancy Unit will also improve the patient experience and waiting times, while the enhanced ambulatory services on the unit will also improve the privacy and dignity of our patients. 

A further advantage of the new Women and Children’s Hospital will be our ability to attract new health sector clinicians and recruits to Cornwall, as well as to help retain our already amazing staff. Reducing the cost of continuous recruitment campaigns is also seen as a big benefit. 

So, what’s next?

The new Women and Children’s Hospital will be built in the centre of the Royal Cornwall Hospital site in Truro – in between (and connected to) Trelawny Wing and the Tower Block. Before we start we need to clear the services in the Link Corridor.

Already Lowen Ward has moved into its forever home at the front of Trelawny Wing and the “goods-in” team (delivering supplies and facilities) will be on the move to an off-site location at Threemilestone later this year. The haematology laboratory will re-locate to a brand-new building next to the existing Microbiology building and the Cardiac Department will be moving to Trelawny Wing by the end of this year, bringing it next to the main Outpatient Department and closer to the other Cardiology Services. 

Once these services have found their new homes, the Link Corridor can be demolished, and a new “hospital street” will be created to ensure the Tower Block and Trelawny Wing remain connected.

It’s a truly exciting time for us here at the Royal Cornwall Hospital and we hope you’ll be following our journey over the next few years as we work toward our ambition to provide outstanding care for one and all. Perhaps you could even become part of our team?

Get in touch

If you’d like to know more about our new Women and Children’s Hospital, please email rcht.buildingprogramme@nhs.net