| Welcome to Blueprint | | Whilst there has been recent focus on our plans for Watford General Hospital we wish to turn the spotlight on our hospitals at Hemel Hempstead and St Albans. There is much to find out about our plans for these hospitals and we invite Blueprint readers to come to the sites to find out more next month. We will offer these visits later in the year too.
Being able to offer rapid diagnostics such as MRI and CT scans is at the heart of our plans and will help us provide ‘one stop’ services which combine different steps of the treatment pathway.
Plans for the new hospital building at Watford General are progressing and in our next edition we will invite you to see what an inpatient room could look and feel like. | | |
|
Would you like to find out more about the plans for our hospitals at Hemel Hempstead and St Albans?
We are inviting Blueprint readers to a briefing session and walkabout at our hospitals at Hemel Hempstead and St Albans. The aim of these events is to bring our service transformation and redevelopment plans to life. We hope you can join us.
Clare Parker – our chief strategy officer – together with a one of our leading clinicians, will explain about our planned new models of care, how diagnostic facilities will be significantly upgraded and how the latest digital technology will be incorporated into the buildings and services.
We’ll also update you on the outline planning applications we have submitted for new and refurbished buildings at the two sites. The tour following the presentation will help you to understand these plans further.
Please email westherts.redevelopment@nhs.net by midnight on Monday 8 August to let us know if you would like to attend one, or both, of the below in-person events at the hospitals.
- Hemel Hempstead Hospital 1.30pm - 4.30pm, Monday 15 August 2022
- St Albans City Hospital 1.30pm - 4.30pm, Thursday 18 August 2022
We expect the presentation and tour to take less than two hours. We have capacity to run two tours at each site and will confirm your slot once we have an idea of numbers who wish to attend.
Due to infection control purposes, attendance will be strictly confirmed by invite only and we encourage attendees to wear a face mask or face covering.
We understand that August marks the summer holidays and some of you may be unable to attend. There will be further opportunities when we run these tours again in autumn, so please do register your interest if you’d like to attend at a later date.
|
|
|
Plans for diagnostics across our estate
Ensuring rapid, conveniently located diagnostics for patients and clinicians is a key part of our clinical strategy.
The forthcoming redesign of services and buildings at our three hospital sites underpins this.
Listening to patients and staff has driven us to make far better use of their time by organising ourselves, our services and our facilities around our patients – putting them at the centre of the care we provide.
Where we can make improvements ahead of new buildings and refurbishment being completed, we will. We are already changing the way some services are managed to allow us to reduce travel between sites. We will continue to work towards ‘one stop’ clinics where many steps of treatment are covered in one visit, such as a diagnostic procedure producing an instant result upon which a treatment plan can be made and discussed, avoiding the need for a follow-up appointment.
A table listing the diagnostics facilities that will be at each site can be found on page 24 of the Your Care, Your Views document. In summary;
Hemel Hempstead Hospital will offer enhanced diagnostic and outpatient services, with a focus on medical specialties and long term conditions. There will be a DEXA scanner here as part of the proposed rheumatology specialist outpatient hub.
St Albans City Hospital will remain as the main site for planned surgical and cancer care, enhanced through investment in theatres and a rapid diagnosis centre with a greater range and higher volume of diagnostics. This will increase the number of ‘one stop shop’ clinics and speed up diagnosis. Enhanced diagnostics will include MRI, CT, nuclear medicine, fluoroscopy and a two storey 2,000m m2 endoscopy unit.
Watford General Hospital will be our site for emergency and specialist care. Our plans are for all of the clinical services to be provided from new buildings on land next to the current site. There will be a much larger emergency department with assessment spaces and diagnostic equipment so that specialist teams can provide expert advice and care without patients needing to be moved around the hospital. This will support the ‘same day emergency care’ model that was outlined in this session presented by Dr Rachel Hoey.
The high-rise design (which is common now for hospitals in the UK and abroad) makes it far easier to co-locate services where there is a good clinical reason for them to be close together. This will also reduce travel time on the site between clinical areas. Take a look at our animation of how a high-rise building at Watford General might look.
A new interventional radiology suite will help us expand the range of treatment we provide, including for critically ill patients and children. We are delighted that our charity Raise is helping to make this ambition a reality. You can find out more about this and how you can help on the Raise website.
|
|
|
Standardised rooms in our new hospital
The new hospital building at Watford General will offer a far higher percentage of single rooms for inpatients.
We are currently planning for around 70 percent of inpatients rooms in the new building to be single occupancy.
And, unlike the variation across our wards in the current main clinical building (the Princess Michael of Kent block), the rooms will be built to a standard layout, with at least half of them having ensuite bathrooms.
In line with NHS standards, our rooms will have sufficient space around beds and an environment that allows greater privacy, dignity and confidentiality for patients, carers and families.
Another benefit is that having standardised wards and inpatient rooms means that staff will be familiar with the overall layout when working in different areas.
We will learn from our Covid-19 pandemic experience and will incorporate measures to help manage a range of infectious diseases. Examples include designing rooms that can quickly be repurposed in the event of an outbreak to ensure appropriate segregation of patient and staff groups or to enable them to be used for critical care.
We also have exciting plans for our wards and our maternity rooms, which will be in a new purpose-built block which will be linked to the new main hospital. Expectant mothers will be in single occupancy rooms before, during and after labour. This will remove the need for them, their birth partners and their babies, to move between different areas. The new design represents the latest in best clinical practice and design standards and we are excited about being able to provide a totally different and much improved experience in the coming years.
We will share some designs of these rooms in the next edition, where we will also update you on our plans for inpatient accommodation.
|
|
|
We welcome Matthew Coats as our new chief executive
Matthew – who joined in early July – brings a wealth of experience to the role. He has some 15 years’ experience in hospital management and a similar number of years spent in central government in roles at the Department of Health, Home Office and Cabinet Office.
Matthew’s NHS experience included the successful turnaround of emergency care at East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust where he was operations director and then deputy chief executive. Read more in our press release.
|
|
| Catch up with redevelopment news | Blueprint - You can read past editions of the Blueprint newsletter on our website under ‘newsletters’. Share the news and get your colleagues and friends to subscribe by emailing westherts.redevelopment@nhs.net
A-Z information sheet - This document addresses frequently asked questions and the main themes from our engagement and redevelopment programme. It will be updated regularly and we will provide details of where information has been added or amended. | |
|
