Care UK invests £1.4m in new operating theatre to help reduce waiting times for NHS patients

COLCHESTER, U.K. - Sept. 29, 2015 - PRLog -- The treatment centre first opened 10 years ago under wave 1 of a Labour government ISTC programme to deal with long waiting lists in the region. It now operates under the Any Qualified Provider (AQP) framework and is commissioned through the NHS standard Acute Contract, after Care UK took the bold step to keep the centre open without any guaranteed volumes or activity of work thanks to strong demand from local patients and their clinicians.

The centre also supports the wider healthcare economy by contracting with some of the local acute trusts to provide outpatients and surgical capacity to assist with their waiting list pressures. Work started this week on the new operating theatre on land adjoining the existing treatment centre. It is scheduled to open in February next year.

To mark the new investment, more than half of the 41 members of the team who have worked at the centre since it opened in 2005 were involved in the turf cutting ceremony for the new theatre, which will use the latest generation of clean air technology to further enhance patient safety and support an already impressive infection control record.

Patients throughout Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire will be able to benefit from the state-of-the-art theatre, which will be using pioneering anaesthetic techniques, developed by the team, to enable people to return home from full replacements as soon as two days after surgery.

Care UK invests £1.4m in new operating theatre to help reduce waiting times for NHS orthopaedic operationsHospital director Martin Page explained: “Care UK is re-investing back into the NHS in order to improve services for patients and to further reduce waiting times for surgery in the region.

“The new theatre will give us four fully functioning facilities and we hope that when it opens next February it will help us to significantly reduce the time many patients, experiencing the pain and inconvenience of worn joints, have to wait for treatment.”

During the 10 years Barlborough NHS Treatment Centre has been in operation, more than 38,000 procedures have been carried out. In the last 12 months alone, more than 2,000 joint operations have been carried out on knees, hips and shoulders.

Last year, according to the Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) collected nationally by the Health and Social Care Information Centre, the Chesterfield centre was 24th in the country for its health gains for hip replacement surgery, putting it comfortably in the top 10 per cent of the 280 hospitals included in the review.

Martin said: “I am delighted we have been able to expand this very successful service, which has seen hospital stays reduced and patient satisfaction increased. Work begins almost 10 years to the day since the centre opened. Since then we have delivered more than 19,000 joint replacements of hip, knee and shoulders and carried out more than 19,000 orthopaedic day case procedures on hands and feet, as well as arthroscopies and spinal procedures.

“We also have 20 per cent of our original team still working with us, which I think shows what a wonderful place the centre is to work, as well as to be a patient. As the team has been the foundation of our services I am delighted they will be involved as we lay the foundations of our future in the shape of the new theatre.”