The Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust hopes to complete work on its new £20m building which will house new surgical theatres by August - and it has now shared images showing what the new wards should look like.
The idea is that the new single-storey building at the Freeman - which has been fast-tracked this year - will house four new surgical theatres and allow medics to carry out thousands more procedures. It will enable the trust to move "thousands of day case procedures" from existing hospital buildings and free up space for more complex operations.
The trust says the new building will help it bring down long waiting lists for some surgical specialities and tackle its Covid -exacerbated backlog of elective procedures. There are currently more than 90,000 people waiting for elective treatment in Newcastle.
Read more: Newcastle hospitals were 'busiest in the country' in January amid drive to cut huge waiting lists
Images now show how areas like the new building's reception and pre-operative bays will look when the project is complete. With an August completion date, hospital bosses said after that would be starting within weeks. Artists' impressions of state-of-the-art new recovery areas and theatres have also been shared.
Along with the new theatres, there will be a day-case assessment area and a recovery area. Executives said the new building would see some musculo-skeletal, urology, cardiothoracic and some general surgery services move. The latest NHS figures showed that in January the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust was the busiest in the country - seeing more than 4,000 elective patients.
Online, the trust said: "The Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the NHS and our services across Newcastle Hospitals and we are now facing a situation where many patients have been waiting months for their planned surgery, which is not what any of us want. It is also clear that the pressure on our urgent care services is not easing and we are continuing to see lots of patients who need emergency care and treatment, which is still impacting on our waiting lists.
"To try and address these challenges, we have embarked on this fast-track project which will allow us to do thousands more low-complexity procedures, which is good news for patients."
Earlier this month, the hospital trust's chief executive Dame Jackie Daniel said: "The circumstances that have converged to create our pressures are not something that we have control over, but we are responding to them positively.
"We are making investments in the workforce and in things that matter to us – better facilities, more flexible working, investment in our estate to improve the working environment, and investment in staff teams (without impacting on existing services) with a recruitment drive about to get under way for the day treatment centre at the Freeman Hospital which opens later this year."
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