CRITICAL CARE CENTRE TO BE DELAYED

The proposed Specialist and Critical Care Centre to treat Gwent's sickest patients may not be fully finished until 2025 - more than a decade after its original planned completion date.

Planning had been suspended through out 2009, however Health bosses are considering phasing the building programme over 10-15 years and planning could be restarted in January.

Priced at around £300 million, it was hoped that the whole centre would be ready by 2014.

But with recession hitting Assembly budgets, last December, health minister Edwina Hart ordered that planning work on the Specialist and Critical Care Centre (SCCC) be halted.

The cost of the SCCC has posed a headache for NHS planners at health board and Assembly level, and with budgets for NHS building projects in Wales oversubscribed, and phasing the development will spread the cost over a longer period.

There were also concerns raised when planning was suspended last year, over whether plans to boost primary and community care services in the area were robust enough to cope with an overall reduction of several hundred hospital beds across Gwent.

The extra time will enable the health board to develop such services.

The aim is to seek Assembly approval and financial support next month for a six-nine month planning period, during 2010, to enable a start to be made on whatever will be the first phase. The centre is earmarked for land on and around the existing Llanfrechfa Grange Hospital site.

It will have 450-500 beds and provide for major and immediately life threatening emergencies, complex surgery, intensive care, consultant-led obstetric care, and children's inpatient care.

Currently, these services are provided mainly at the Royal Gwent and Nevill Hall Hospitals, and the board will have to maintain these sites while the SCCC is developed.