Hospital upgrades are hailed by Shrewsbury’s MP

Ongoing improvements at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital are being hailed by the town’s MP who says multi-million-pound upgrades are ‘already delivering real benefits to patients’ with waiting times down and the RSH rising 20 places in the league tables.

Shrewsbury MP Julia Buckley says she is also looking forward to two new wards opening this winter, plus an additional 56 acute ward beds this December.

“This transformation of the hospital is creating much-needed modern facilities and clinical space needed to improve care for everyone.”

Addressing colleagues in Westminster this week, the MP said: “For many years Shrewsbury & Telford Hospital Trust has languished at the bottom of the national league tables. We had the worst waiting times for both elective care and emergency treatment as well as for ambulance pick-ups.

“Worst still, when we finally got an ambulance, it would then spend many, many hours sitting outside our A&E because there were not enough beds to treat urgent patients. Much of this was documented at the time in the television programme Dispatches, which was a blow for the morale of our hard-working NHS staff.”

Addressing the Westminster Hall debate on Cross-Border Health Care, Mrs Buckley said: “Since then I am delighted to report radical changes at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.

“Thanks to a significant capital investment project of over £320m, we have been the recipient of a Hospital Transformation Programme to improve health and care services in Shropshire, Telford and mid Wales.

“We are now one year into that construction project with over half the structure completed and progress on a new four-storey building at the front entrance of the site.

“I visited last week and the whole area is unrecognisable from when I gave birth to my daughter there in an old outdated ward. The new infrastructure will provide the much-needed modern facilities and clinical space needed to improve care for everyone, and will inter-connect with the refurbished existing hospital.