A new hospital will provide many opportunities for us to improve care for you:
• A new purpose-built environment will allow us to meet standards for modern healthcare and improve the patient and staff experience.
• A reduction in the duplication of some services across sites will allow us the scale to provide better care, for example access to senior clinical decision makers quickly (i.e. 24/7).
• There are more services we could offer from a new hospital, within the boundaries of Hywel Dda, which we are not able to now (we are exploring options for providing some specialist services such as radiotherapy, neurology services, and cardiac catheterisation services).
• The experience we have seen in other places is that staff want to work in new hospitals as they have the latest facilities and technologies and can improve employee well-being.
• It would also allow us to offer more attractive rotas (for example fewer unsociable hours) to medical staff and trainees, and to provide health education, academic, research and innovation facilities on the site, for all clinical staff, including nurses and therapists.
• By separating planned and emergency care at the new hospital, we will avoid the risk of emergency activity negatively affecting planned care through cancelled operations.
• Re-purposing Glangwili and Withybush as community hospitals with facilities for step-up or step-down beds and care, and strengthened community services, will help us reach our ambition to discharge most patients from the Urgent and Planned Care Hospital to their own homes or more local community hospitals within 72 hours.
• Planning and delivering care differently, and having modern and efficient buildings, would support us to reduce our carbon footprint and help us meet our target of 34% carbon reduction by 2030. This will contribute to the Welsh Government’s ambition to address the climate emergency.