New eye hospital on time and budget, bosses say

The hospital will provide "state-of-the-art" facilities, according to the council and health trust

The construction of a new eye hospital is "to timescale and on budget", project chiefs say.

Work on the facility in Sunderland, on the site of the former Vaux Brewery on Plater Way, officially began last November.

Providing services to patients from across the North East and North Cumbria, it is expected to open in 2026 and will replace the current eye hospital on Queen Alexandra Road.

The project is a collaboration between Sunderland City Council and South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust.

'Transform surgery'

The trust's chief executive, Ken Bremner MBE, this week told the local authority's health and wellbeing scrutiny committee that the building was "rapidly going up".

He added: "It's to timescale and it's on budget at the moment.

"We’ve got to get through two winters yet so, subject to those two winters, we still expect to be taking patients sometime around Easter time 2026.

"Hopefully it will get handed over before that but that's the date we’ve got in mind for the first patients coming."

The meeting also heard an agreement had not yet been reached over the official name for the new hospital, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Speaking in November 2022, the then leader of the council, Graeme Miller, said the facility would "transform ophthalmologic surgery in Sunderland" by bringing it into the city centre.

He described the current hospital as "unfortunately in the wrong place and too old".