Monday, 3 September 2012
Neath Port Talbot Hospital is moving forward with a number of new or expanded services being developed on site in the coming months.
Despite the movement of the Acute Medicine service to other ABMU hospitals for safety reasons in August, Neath Port Talbot Hospital will continue to play a very important role in the plans of the Health Board.Over £2 million is being invested in a raft of services at the hospital.
Paul Stauber, ABMU’s Director of Planning, said:
“The investments being made in new or bigger services at the hospital demonstrate our commitment to its future. We want to expand the key role it plays in delivering healthcare alongside our other hospitals.
“These new Neath Port Talbot Hospital services will treat patients from across the Health Board area – and in some cases even beyond that.”
Currently being built at the hospital is the new highly specialist IVF unit which will be one of only two NHS centres in South Wales providing IVF fertility treatment (the other one is in Cardiff). This service will be one which treats patients from a wide area across south and mid Wales.
The work is expected to be completed towards the end of the year with the new service starting up early in 2013.
The existing Urology service at Neath Port Talbot is being moved up to a whole new level with a major expansion of the service scheduled to take place before Christmas.
The state-of-the-art day case diagnostic investigation unit is being set up to deal with patients not only from Neath Port Talbot, but Swansea and Bridgend as well. It will be able to investigate, diagnose and treat many bladder conditions, and will include a new lithotripsy service which uses shock waves to break down kidney stones. It will also be able to diagnose and treat prostate problems, and deal with conditions like recurring bladder infections.
It is expected to treat in excess of 4,000 patients a year, and the unit is being designed with further capacity in mind to cater for any increases in future demand.
Breast surgery at Neath Port Talbot Hospital is also stepping up a gear to cater for an increasing number of Swansea women as well as patients from Neath Port Talbot.
The service will not only be able to provide surgery for the majority of breast cancer patients, and those with benign conditions, it will also support the breast reconstructive service at Morriston Hospital by offering less complicated breast reconstructive surgery, which will help reduce waiting times for many women.
The breast surgery service at Neath Port Talbot Hospital is expected to increase the number of patients it deals with by an additional 20 per month by October.
Another exciting imminent service development is the Orthopaedic service which will be switching focus to become the ABMU centre of excellence for shoulder, feet and ankle joint surgery.
These beds will also be ring-fenced, which means that they can only be used for planned orthopaedic surgery; taking away the risk of an operation being cancelled to make way for an emergency patient. This development is expected to be in place by the end of the year, and will involve over 2,000 operations a year.
While these developments will be among the earliest to come to fruition at Neath Port Talbot Hospital in the coming months, they won’t be the last. Work is underway as part of the Health Board’s Changing for the Better process to develop even more services at the hospital, and more details will be shared as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, patients are reminded once more that the nurse-led Minor Injury Unit at Neath Port Talbot Hospital continues to be available 24/7 to all patients, not just those in the Neath Port Talbot area.
Ends
