New surgery unit to be built at Leicester General Hospital

The land is currently used as a staff car park

A new surgery unit will open at Leicester General Hospital to help cut the length of time people are waiting for procedures.

It will be built on land next to the Brandon Unit - currently a staff car park - after Leicester City Council's planning department approved the plan.

The single-storey structure will house an operating theatre, as well as pre-op and post-op beds for patients.

The hospital's trust has plans for further developments to the site.

University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust hopes to bring the vacant Brandon Unit back into use, with a separate application to be submitted to the council.

The second phase would see the new building connected to the refurbished unit, and the accommodation area included in the current application redeveloped into a second operating theatre.

The most recent figures submitted by the trust at its October board meeting show Leicester's hospitals are consistently failing to hit the target of zero patients waiting over a year for elective or non-urgent surgery.

Some 18,422 had been on the waiting list for longer than 52 weeks as of August this year, up from 17,187 in May.

Some 33 car parking spaces would be lost through the work, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said, but the trust says there is enough staff parking elsewhere on the site.

"The proposed development will improve the provision of health services in the city and county", council officers concluded, adding the design was "appropriate to the site and use".