New Leicester hospital care centre to deliver 100,000 more appointments a year

A new care centre at Leicester’s hospitals will deliver around 100,000 more appointments a year when fully open. Phase two of the East Midlands Planned Care Centre (EMPCC) is due to welcome its first patients next month.

Based in the former Brandon Unit at Leicester General Hospital it will be a hub for elective – non-urgent – procedures, with nine specialities set to expand into it initially. These will range from general surgery and gastroenterology to bloods and urology. However, the space is designed to be flexible, meaning specialities can move in and out of the centre depending on where the demand is.

The £40 million centre is intended to cut the length of time patients are waiting for non-urgent care. A month out from the grand opening of the EMPCC, we sat down with Simon Barton, deputy chief executive at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) and consultant oral and maxillofacial surgeon Hazel Busby-Earle to find out how the new centre will help achieve that.

READ MORE: More than one in four Leicester children aged 10 and 11 are obese

Mr Barton said the centre will “massively reduce waiting times” for elective care patients. The longest waits – 65 weeks – would come down to less than a year, he said. However, just dropping below a year is not enough. Mr Barton said the trust’s “ambition” was to get back to the pre-pandemic target of 18-weeks and “to get there first”.

When asked how the EMPCC would push them towards that target, he said: “By the number of patients that it’s going to see. So around 100,000 more appointments than we currently see. And every patient who gets treated here, obviously then comes off our waiting list.”

“The [number of people on] waiting lists will plummet”, resulting in much shorter waits for patients, he added. UHL will also tailor the offering to the areas of most need, with Mr Barton saying the trust will “flex it around dependent on what the waiting times are to try to reduce some of the inequalities in [speciality] waiting times”.

The extra space at the EMPCC is “all additional capacity” and an increase of around 10 per cent on what the hospitals currently offer, Mr Barton continued. The departments selected for the centre will expand into the EMPCC, rather than simply moving from their current bases into the new building, with new staff joining to help deliver the extended care offering, he said.

The new centre will also offer more certainty for patients. Ms Busby-Earle said that patients currently can make all the arrangements for their surgery and arrive at the hospital, only for their procedure to be cancelled due to an incoming emergency case. Because the EMPCC is specifically to deliver elective and less complex care, there is less chance of procedures being pushed back, she added.

She said: “It takes a lot physically, emotionally, mentally to get yourself ready for a surgical procedure. You arrange childcare, you arrange support, you arrange time off from work, then you come into the hospital and your procedure is cancelled, through not fault of your own and through no fault of the surgeon […]

“A facility like this is going to significantly reduce the risk of a procedure being cancelled. So people having less complexed procedures can come in, can have their procedure on the day it’s supposed to happen and can go home.

"They don’t have to sit at home, they don’t have to get more unwell, they don’t have to have that uncertainty. It gives them that almost guarantee that they will get their procedure when it’s planned.”

Ms Busby-Earle added: “We are aiming to be leaders in healthcare and trusted in our communities. This is a significant positive step to show we are doing what we say we’re going to do […] It is an exciting time."

The new centre is set to open to patients on Monday, December 9. A new pharmacy will also be set up in the building, which is expected to open at a later date.