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.

CAMERAS TO PATROL ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY WARDS

A £300,000 CCTV pilot to tackle violent and aggressive behaviour towards NHS workers is being launched today (15 December) by the Welsh Assembly Government.

The one-year scheme will see CCTV cameras installed in four accident and emergency departments across Wales including the Royal Gwent in Newport and five ambulances in Cardiff. I

mages from the cameras will be used to help prosecute people who are violent and aggressive towards NHS staff. This pilot is one of 54 measures contained in a report commissioned by the Welsh Assembly Government earlier in the year to crack down on violence and aggression against health-care workers.

The Assembly Government’s health minister, Edwina Hart, said:

“It is unacceptable that NHS staff face wilful violence and aggression while going about their day-to-day duties caring for patients. The introduction of CCTV cameras will help provide more evidence to support prosecutions and act as a deterrent, making people think twice before abusing staff.”

MOTHER OF TWO DIED FROM UNDIAGNOSED MENINGITIS

A mother-of-two died of meningitis after she was diagnosed with an ear infection, an inquest heard today. Gwent Coroner’s Court heard how Sarah Stitt, 36, of Magor visited numerous doctors over the course of a month complaining of severe earache.

Mrs Stitt was admitted to the Royal Gwent Hospital, Newport, on February 8, 2009, after she and her husband Sean insisted that she be kept in because the pain was so bad, but she died within hours.

A post-mortem examination revealed that she died of meningitis as a complication of infections in her inner ear and the bone behind her ear. Gwent Coroner David Bowen recorded a narrative verdict, describing the events that led to Mrs Stitt’s death. He said the treatment which partially resolved the inner ear infection had masked the fact there was an underlying infection of the bone behind her ear which, if diagnosed, would have raised the suspicion of meningitis.

Meningitis, he said, was not diagnosed until after her death and so the opportunity to treat it was missed. She died after being in constant pain for a month, he said.