A NEW emergency department at Derriford Hospital will be good news for residents of South East Cornwall says a local councillor.

Construction of the new Urgent and Emergency Care Centre is set to start in November of next year with the facility to open in 2025.

Derriford Hospital deals with 100,000 A+E attendances each year but the emergency department, built in the 1970s, is woefully undersized for the current need, says the University Hospitals Plymouth (UHP) Trust.

The Trust says that keeping things as they are is simply not an option. It says that the new facility will not only improve the situation in A+E, but will also relieve pressure on general wards of the hospital.

The new Urgent and Emergency Care Centre will include a dedicated paedicatric emergency department with the scope to offer all levels of care, in order to avoid the need for children to share adult spaces.

A new suite of operating theatres is also planned at Derriford, which will reduce the “significant numbers of patients waiting more than 52 weeks for surgery” and ensure the hospital is meeting the standards required of a Major Trauma Centre. One benefit of the new theatres will be that more patients can be treated using the most modern and least invasive techniques, reducing hospital stays and improving outcomes, says the Trust.

“As things currently stand, with the twin impacts of population growth and an ageing population, the gap in capacity and quality of care, versus growing demand and patient expectations, will only increase,” the Trust said. “The status quo is not an option, nor is a reactive approach of simply adding new capacity. The chosen solution needs to be future-proof, scalable and flexible enough to deal with the inherent uncertainty of future healthcare needs in the south west.”

Looe Councillor Armand Toms, like many local people, has first-hand experience of the current issues facing Derriford: he spent 19 hours in A+E recently after falling and breaking two ribs.

“I believe that this project is good news for the 121,000 residents from SE Cornwall that use Derriford Hopsital, and important for our health care services,” he said. “The report given to Cornwall Council’s Health and Adult Social Care Overview and Scrutiny Commmitee gives a lot of information about other parts of the A+E process and about the planned better capacity to treat and move patients through the system.”