DOES four fit into one? Only time will tell if the £842 million Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow has been a success.
A new two-part documentary, Scotland’s Superhospital, takes the temperature of the purpose-built state-of-the-art healthcare facility that opened in April and when fully operational will serve 41 per cent of Scotland’s population.
The monumental task of moving the Southern General, Western Infirmary, Victoria Infirmary and Yorkhill Children’s Hospital to the new site was a hugely ambitious project and a logistical nightmare in more ways than one.
It has hit the headlines, not always for positive reasons, from failing to meet recommended waiting times in A&E to an air quality scare that saw the bone marrow transplant service being transferred back to the Beatson Centre.
The facts and figures of the operation, as well as the very human stories of the staff and patients are captured by the cameras for a BBC One documentary tonight.
The move for Southern General respiratory consultant Dr Kevin Blyth was only a few hundred yards, but it took his department from the 19th straight into the 21st century. In the old Victorian building where he had to carry out endoscopy procedures, there sometimes was neither heating nor hot water.
“It was almost every few months where the heating would break, it would be a pipe or something, and we had to create some workaround to make sure the patient wasn’t cancelled,” he said.
“On a Tuesday morning before my ward round the first thing I did was go to the theatre check the heating was working. If it wasn’t I would phone the estates guy and get it fixed, so that it was working in the afternoon.
“You just make those things work. We were practising modern medicine in buildings that just weren’t designed to have that number of patients. They just weren’t set up to deal with modern infection control.”
Dealing daily with lung disease, a massive problem in the West of Scotland, the new respiratory unit will take up one floor of the new hospital.
“The new accommodation hasn’t changed our medical practice. The big structural advantage is that for the chest unit we now have 17 chest consultants in one place,” said Dr Blyth, 39, who studied at the University of Glasgow and lives in South Glasgow.
“Before in the individual hospitals you might have had, say at Gartnavel, expertise in cystic fibrosis and at the Southern you might have had expertise in pleural diseases and cancer, at the Victoria you might have expertise in TB management.
“The big change is that when a patient comes to the new hospital they are served by all those people, they are all in the same place.
“Medicine is getting more complex every year so you do need not just a chest doctor to look after you but it would be advantageous to have the right chest doctor who specialises in that particular area of disease.”
That does not mean that the new hospital does not present its challenges.
Patients are all in single rooms, which can be isolating for some, especially the elderly, and makes the working day more physically demanding for nursing staff.
“The wards are enormous, they have 28 beds in rooms around a central column. For the nurses to manage those beds and be able to check all the patients, it used to be the case they would be central and could see the ward. Now to see everyone they have to go into every room.
“The very consistent feedback from nurses is that it is very demanding, they are on their feet all the time. That has caused a bit of negativity because it’s different and it’s hard and people get anxious about having sick people in places they can’t see.
“All these things will evolve, it’s not perfect by any means, there are definitely problems.”
Scotland’s Superhospital, November 2, BBC One, 9pm
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