Town to get new emergency department in 2024

Building work has already begun on Swindon's new emergency department

Swindon's Great Western Hospital has secured £26m to build a large extension to its emergency department, which is due to open in the summer of 2024.

It has been years in the planning but comes after a winter of unprecedented pressure on services.

Local NHS bosses say the build should make a "huge difference" to the hospital's capacity.

The new emergency facilities will also free up space within the hospital to create more ward beds.

Despite being one of the region's newest hospitals, there were concerns from the outset 20 years ago the Great Western Hospital (GWH) would prove too small for the expected growth in Swindon and the surrounding areas.

Hospital boss Kevin McNamara says the new building will be designed to allow ambulances to unload more quickly

The hospital's chief executive, Kevin McNamara, hailed the announcement as an "extraordinary milestone" but warned it would be a "massively complex project" to deliver.

"The case I think is very obvious as to why we need a bigger emergency department, just this past winter we've seen the impact of constrained services and what that means," said Mr McNamara.

• LISTEN: BBC Radio Wiltshire reports from the building site & explains more about the history

GWH has at times seen record delays in its ambulance handover times, as well as the hours patients have waited to get a ward bed.

The emergency department was originally designed to serve 48,000 patients per year. Nowadays it sees more than 100,000.

"Swindon has grown considerably," said Julian Auckland-Lewis, the GWH expansion's programme director. "Swindon's population will have grown by approximately 40% between the point at which this hospital opened and the end of this decade."

The car park and land near the existing emergency department is now a building site

The NHS foundation trust that runs GWH has already invested £5.5m towards the project, allowing it to have already started the groundwork for the build.

It has been in talks to secure today's £26m investment from central government since 2018.

The new facility will create a large, new emergency department, a more capable same-day emergency care facility, and a new children's emergency unit.

It follows the completion of a new urgent treatment centre at the hospital in 2022, which has become the new 'front door' from where all emergency and urgent care is now triaged.

The build's programme director Julian Auckland-Lewis says the hospital was built "arguably a little bit too small"

Health Minister Lord Markham said the £26m of government funding represented "the biggest-ever investment in this site", bringing together several services "so patients get the right care more quickly, boosting health outcomes and reducing the time spent in hospital".

The build is expected to be largely completed in spring 2024, with the new facilities open and running by late summer the same year.