Heartbeat: Bricks and mortar build hearts and minds

February 21, 2020

Whilst Midland Met is amongst one of the biggest building projects undertaken by our Trust, you would be wrong to assume it’s the only project underway. Across the organisation, teams of architects, colleagues in estates are working hard to turn piles of bricks and mortar into facilities to save lives and transform care.

At Sandwell Hospital, behind the railing and the hoardings surrounding what was previously porta-cabins and car parking spaces, you can see the foundations being laid to form what will be the new Carters Green Medical Centre, boasting 20 consulting rooms and serving over 15,000 patients, the 6 million pound centre will transform GP led care for the local community.

Similarly at City Hospital changes that have long been in discussions are quickly coming to fruition to ensure that we can continue providing the best care possible. Neonatal has now reopened its newly revamped unit with a spacious high dependency unit and critical care has returned to its base on the ground floor following a refurbishment.

To find out more about the changes taking place across the Trust, Heartbeat caught up with Jayne Dunn, Director of Commissioning for Midland Met and Retained Estates to find out more, she said, “It’s fair to say 2020 is a transformation year, colleagues will see that we’re now delivering on the plans that we have been long developing, with many service moves having taken place in 2019 and more planned for 2020, these new facilities are set to help us deliver on our care promises.

“At City, we’ve recently relocated our fracture clinic to the Birmingham Treatment Centre and work is now underway to create an integrated children’s emergency department and paediatric assessment unit so that our young patients presenting at the hospital are able to be seen and treated promptly.”

Alongside the redevelopment of clinical spaces for urgent and emergency frontline services, the estates team have also been hard at work creating new facilities for planned diagnostic services. A new MRI suite has been set up on the ground floor of the Birmingham Treatment Centre and the team supported the arrival of a brand new CT scanner on the first floor of the Birmingham Treatment Centre. The new scanner will reduce waiting times for patients as well as improvements in speed and accuracy of scans.