Super-hospital construction passes halfway
Manchester's new hospitals campus on Oxford Road is more than 50% complete, according to the chairman of the area's NHS hospital trust, Peter Mount.
Work on the £500m complex, which will open in summer 2009 and includes the largest integrated children's hospital outside America, began in 2004. The main contractors are Bovis Lend Lease and Catalyst.
Facilities completed so far include:
- Manchester Heart Centre
- Haemotology Unit
- Endoscopy Department
- Adult rehabilitation building, with two in-patient wards including stroke rehabilitation and general rehabilitation. Each ward has its own multi-disciplinary team and therapy gym
- Academic education campus
- Library
- Multi-storey car park for staff and visitors
Other facilities still to be built include:
- 393-bed children's hospital with its own accident and emergency unit
- Women's hospital
- 758-bed adult hospital, built over five floors, featuring an elective care treatment centre, a cardiac service development and a specialist renal service development
- Sexual health centre
- Facilities management centre
- Clinical Sciences block
- MRI and Royal Eye hospital
The new integrated complex will bring together services currently provided by five of the hospitals run by Central Manchester and Manchester Children's University Hospitals NHS Trust. These are Booth Hall Children's Hospital, Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Saint Mary's Hospital for Women and Children and the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital.
Peter Mount, chairman of the CMMC Hospital Trust said: "The development of our central site is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We are immensely proud of our hospitals' achievements, but we want to do more to improve the quality of services and the environment in which they are delivered.
"Our existing buildings are much loved by patients because they know they get a high standard of skilled, specialist care from dedicated staff. But some of these buildings were designed more than a hundred years ago for models of care that we would find wholly unacceptable these days.
"We need all our specialists available on one site so that we can deal with patients who need expert care to a high standard without delay. At the moment, staff members have to take valuable working time to cross Manchester between hospitals – and so do our patients."
