'A brighter future for Torbay Hospital, our patients and our skilled staff'

As you may know, we are very proud to be part of the government’s New Hospital Programme and welcomed the assurance given by the Prime Minister last year that we are on track to have our new hospital buildings completed at Torbay Hospital by 2030.

What you may not know is just why this is so important to us (and to you). Our hospital in Torbay is the third oldest in the country. Some of it, including sections where some of our wards are based, dates back to Edwardian times and the majority of it is over 50 years old. While we are very proud of the care that our dedicated staff deliver, we are not proud of the environment that many of them have to work in or in which we provide care to you and your loved ones.

If you’ve visited the hospital recently you may have noticed the specialist scaffolding on our Tower Block which we’ve installed due to defects in the concrete. The scaffolding includes multiple crash decks to ensure any debris that becomes loose is caught at each level.  This will keep everyone safe but it comes at a high cost – around £1million. Each year we spend millions of pounds fixing problems caused by our old estate or putting protection in place to reduce risks rather than investing in what we need (and local people deserve).

From sewage leaks to leaking roofs, from windows that don’t open to theatres with cooling systems that struggle on hot days, there is always something that needs our attention. Closing areas or creating diversions while we work to install workarounds or deliver projects, cause significant disruption to our patients, their families and our staff. It takes a lot of time, money and people to keep our hospital buildings functioning. But that’s not the core of the issue for us – for us, it is about the people we’re here to care for.

All these estates problems can lead to cancelled appointments and operations, patient beds being temporarily out of use, poor experiences for patients and poor working environments for staff. 

When we have the right buildings, like our new endoscopy centre which opened last November, we can give people better experiences and reduce the time they have to wait for treatment or care. Just before the new centre opened we had over 1,100 people waiting to be seen by our endoscopy service – now we have fewer than 150 and we hope that before much longer we will have no one waiting longer than a few days. 

The design and layout of our new eye surgery day theatre and recovery spaces (which opened just last month) means that we can prepare for 10 patients at a time and treat more people in each surgery ‘list’. This will mean 3,000 more people will get the eye surgery they need every year. All this is great news for local people and just shows what our people can do when they have the right facilities and environment in which to deliver modern healthcare.

You will see and hear us talk more about our buildings as we move closer to our new hospital. We hope to be able to begin the work needed to prepare the site for our new buildings over the next year. This will include removing a number of old buildings and delivering the enabling works for power and other essential service infrastructure for the new buildings. It will also mean reorganising and maximising our car parking capacity so this is in place before we start the main build to protect and improve our car parking facilities. 

We are looking forward to sharing our plans with you as these develop. We are excited about the positive benefits that modern, fit-for-purpose buildings will bring – helping us build a brighter future for everyone in Torbay and South Devon.