A new £8 million unit at Worcestershire Royal Hospital has welcomed its first patients.

It is hoped the Acute Medical Unit (AMU) – located on the first floor of the Worcestershire Oncology Centre – will help ease the pressure on urgent and emergency care services.

The 29-bed unit, funded by an extra £8 million of capital funding from NHS England (NHSE), will create additional capacity and allow patients referred by their GP to be admitted directly to the ward.

This should help to reduce delays and congestion in the Emergency Department, free up space and help improve ambulance handover times.

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Matthew Hopkins, chief executive of Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “With continuing high levels of pressure on our urgent and emergency care services, it’s important that our teams - actively supported by colleagues from across our local health and care system - work together to make the best possible use of all the services that are available to us.

“The AMU is the first part of a series of developments aimed at creating extra capacity, delivering a better patient experience and easing some of the pressure on our teams, but this is a challenge that will take a whole trust and whole system approach to tackle.

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“Getting our new AMU open has taken a huge amount of effort. Special thanks go to the project team, particularly given the speed with which we had to get the build completed and additional technical problems that had to be overcome, and to our clinical teams and all the teams who support them who managed to move as planned.”

The next phase of the continuing efforts to reduce waiting times and manage ambulance handovers in a more timely way is the creation of a 21-bed Pathway Discharge Unit (PDU) later this month.

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The PDU nursing team will care for patients who have been identified as ready to be discharged  from hospital with additional support, and ensure they are able to leave in the most timely way possible.

Work is also continuing on a new expanded and relocated urgent and emergency care centre, which will fully open at the hospital next year.