Heartbeat: MMUH masterplan gets going!

February 17, 2021

Our long awaited new hospital continues to progress well on Grove Lane in Smethwick. Construction partner Balfour Beatty have worked closely with the Trust to ensure staff on site can work safely, amid the Covid-19 restrictions and the new hospital opening remains set for 2022.

The construction of the building is, of course, only one part of the numerous work streams that need to come together to ensure that on opening day everything works, we are safely able to treat patients and that we begin to realise the benefits that this fantastic new building brings.

Many areas of work depend on each other to ensure that delivery milestones are met and over the past few months Rachel Barlow, Director of System Transformation, has been working with teams across the Trust to pull together the masterplan and this month led a workshop with workstream leads and others so that all had an understanding of the different programmes and how they interact.

Talking about the new hospital build programme, Rachel said: “We are continuing to see good progress on the build, despite the complications of COVID-19. Now is the time for clinical, operational and support teams to think through what they need to do over the next 18 months to get ready to move into the new building. The model of care that we will provide in Midland Met has been set out in outline, but of course each specialty and service needs to spend time understanding the way they want and need to work when we have a single acute hospital on one site.

“We have long intended that patients who need to stay in hospital at MMUH will be supported to be as independent as possible. This means things like encouraging people to be more mobile and move around the hospital, making use of the public spaces and ample grounds. This is quite different to our usual practice, so needs a change in how we arrange care and think about our patients. This is just one example of a change we need to make.”

Mark Taylor is leading the IT workstream for Midland Met. He said: “We’ve spent time understanding what the technical requirements are for the new hospital and when the key points are that we need to finalise decisions about things such as digital wayfinding and the technology that is going into each bedroom. It’s been good to see how everything fits together.”

Early in the New Year clinical groups will be setting up their governance structures for MMUH, and acute care transformation projects will begin. From April clinical and operational “move” leads will be recruited and operational policies will be reviewed and changed where needed.

Rachel continued, “We have done large scale transformation at this Trust before and I know we have all the right foundations in place to make sure Midland Met is a real success story and provides the clinical care for our patients that they deserve.”