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The walls and rooms are bare, with wires and cables hanging from incomplete ceilings, but the excitement is palpable.
Simon Milburn and Phil Woolfall, clinical directors of radiology at South Tees Hospitals and North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation trusts respectively, are certainly impressed as they look around what will become the Tees Valley Community Diagnostic Centre in Stockton, dedicated to patients’ tests. “It’s like an early Christmas for me,” says Dr Milburn.
The forthcoming building has taken just over a year to erect from the rubble of the former Swallow Hotel, and could starting seeing patients as soon as late February. “It’s just a huge investment in diagnostics in Teesside, it’s the biggest investment I’m going to see during my career,” says Dr Milburn.
“It’s allowed us to provide necessary diagnostic equipment to undertake all the tests we’ve been asked to do. You’ve got endoscopy, you’ve got cardiac studies, respiratory studies. You’ll be able to come here and get your scans done and your blood tests.
“It’s just great knowing we can provide a better service for the population of Teesside really. It removes those constraints of people waiting longer than they should,” adds Dr Milburn.
“The first thing is overall capacity to scan patients. In terms of waiting times, they’ll come down,” he says. He believes it will also “level the playing field” for how quickly people from different parts of Teesside can get their tests. As a patient, you want to come somewhere like this rather than queueing inside James Cook or North Tees.”
Dr Woolfall agrees: “To come along for a scan, probably already anxious, and if somebody pushes past who’s really badly injured or really ill, people get really stressed by that kind of thing. They don’t have to see that here.”
Dr Milburn saw the building last when it was merely an outer shell, and immediately found it offered the luxury of space to clinicians and patients alike. “The big thing at that time was just how massive the building is,” he says.
“This is about four times as big as our actual waiting room,” says Dr Woolfall in one of the building’s sub-waiting areas, with expansive windows looking out over Stockton High Street. “It’s lovely, it shows what can be done when you put the right investment into NHS facilities. We’re used to working in old buildings that are not fit for purpose anymore and haven’t been for many years.”
Dr Milburn says: “When you’re used to trying to cram lots of equipment and people into small spaces, it’s good just being in a custom-built building. We work in departments that were probably big enough to provide the service 20, 30 years ago. The amount of equipment and people we now have are now crammed into quite a small footprint.
“More often than not, radiology departments are sort of shoehorned into buildings. You’ve got rooms that are just big enough to get the equipment in. If you look in some departments you’ll find slightly jaunty angles just to fit them in.”
These heavy-duty pieces of equipment, “the toys” as he puts it – two MRI scanners, two CT scanners and an X-ray machine – are not in yet. Siemens-built machines are due to come over from Germany next month.
These are not small pieces of kit. The MRI scanners need access routes built into the walls of the centre itself.
“They are so big, they don’t go down corridors,” says Steve Taylor, director of estates at University Hospitals Tees. “You’ve got to take a wall out to get them in. It’s been designed as a cut-out section.
“In hospitals it’s really difficult. You usually have to have a huge crane to lift them in. I would say the X-ray rooms and MRI are at least 50 to 100% bigger than in the existing estate.
“When they’re replaced they’ll come back out this way as well,” he says, reminding us that state-of-the-art technology moves on quickly.
Dr Woolfall says: “By the time you get to their end of life at seven to 10 years, they are pretty much obsolete. The ones at the acute sites get absolutely thrashed.”
The sensitive, complex machines will need specialised installation teams, and will need to be tested on “phantoms”, says Dr Milburn: “They take a while to set up. It’s not like plugging in a new fridge.”
And, as Dr Woolfall slightly sheepishly points out: “We use a lot of power.” Mr Taylor explains: “It’s a two-megawatt power supply for this building to power all the MRI and X-ray machines, a similar level of power supply to North Tees hospital.”
The CT and MRI scanners, X-ray and ultrasound, will be on the ground floor, with dedicated control rooms between the scan rooms. The first floor will house blood tests, respiratory, physiology and cardiology services with consulting and examination rooms, waiting areas throughout the building and other rooms yet to be decided.
“We left a spare room knowing that activity is going to go up over the years,” says Mr Taylor. “We’re already thinking we need an MRI in here now. We’ve built a footprint big enough so it’s just fitting out a room rather than having to extend the building.”
As well as patients, they know what it means for staff, and the ability to recruit and keep them. They will even be blessed with a decent-sized staff room. “It normally ends up being a broom cupboard or something,” says Mr Taylor. “If you’re lucky,” quips Dr Milburn.
Mr Taylor recalls how the design evolved, with colleagues and advisors getting around the table as Stockton Council cleared the site for them: “They were demolishing most of the High Street and they prioritised this side of the site so we could get on with our building.
“We started with a blank sheet of paper and started to draw what was the correct flow for patients coming in and designed the layout. We got a load of the clinical team in together to sit around and pore over the drawings and make adjustments with the architect, to get it to where we wanted it to be.
“Everyone could make comment and make changes and tweak, and eventually it evolved to the point everyone was happy with it. It moved really quickly, that design process. Getting everyone together in one room was a much more effective and faster way to design the building.”
Mr Taylor speaks of the project’s rewards: “I live in Stockton and all my friends and family will use this facility. It’s fantastic to be able to be involved in it.
“It’s the first building we’ve built as a health group that’s net zero carbon in operation. We don’t have a natural gas supply, it’s all electrical, we have renewable energy within the building, solar panels on the roof.”
Michael Houghton, director of transformation at the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust, says: “I think it’s going to be an absolutely brilliant facility for patients in Stockton and across wider Teesside. Easy access, a place where they can get the diagnostic tests they need in one location, and it’s going to be a great place for people to work in terms of how it’s been designed.
“This is about looking at the health of the population and providing a facility that enables early diagnosis and better outcomes. You don’t have to come to a hospital site, it’s a lot more comfortable and convenient.
“The design of it is the key. It’s how it should be. The experience of patients is going to be better and it’s going to be a good place for staff to work, the space to do the job they need to do.”
The clinicians believe the centre will make more efficiency by separating planned tests from emergency work. Dr Milburn says: “In theory here they can set their appointments and know they can keep up with them. You know you’re more likely to get the scan at the time we say, rather than having to apologise we’re running late because of an emergency.”
Mr Taylor says: “We’re going to start bringing it into operational use in February and gradually expand the use from there. There might be some little bits we can use while we commission the rest of the building, because the X-ray machines and MRIs are very complicated pieces of equipment.
“There’s a ramp-up, it’s getting all that staff familiarisation and a gradual increase in capacity. That’ll be over a number of months.”
The official opening will be months down the line, with a date to be confirmed. Councillor Nigel Cooke, Stockton Council’s cabinet member for regeneration, said: “It’s a really good use of this space.
“I think the progress is tremendous. Last time I was here we were stood on earth, we were trying to visualise what was going to happen. I think there were a few steel girders.
“There’s going to be hundreds of people a week visiting this for appointments, hundreds more people in Stockton High Street. I’m sure they’ll use their time to do other things as well, spend money in local shops.
“You’re going to have lots more people visiting to have their diagnostic tests and we’ll still have people working and visiting the High Street as well. So that model of repurposing is really going well.”
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