Mobile operating theatre to help cut waits for operations for Gwent patients

The mobile unit is being brought in by Aneurin Bevan University Health Board to boost surgical capacity, to help eliminate waits of more than 36 weeks for treatment.

It will be sited at the Royal Gwent Hospital, and is expected to be used from October until near the end of the year, by which time the board must ensure that no patient has been waiting beyond 36 weeks. It will then seek to sustain that position.

Achieving that target will unlock a share of £30 million from the Welsh Government for further reducing waiting times across Wales.

But capacity remains an issue, and the health board - which already commissions extra operating slots at the NHS Treatment Centre at Emersons Green in Bristol - is keen to increase further the amount of operations it can perform.

The biggest obstacle to eliminating waits of more than 36 weeks is in trauma and orthopaedics.

Waiting times figures for July will be released later today, but those for June show the scale of the challenge.

Of the 813 patients who had been waiting more than 36 weeks by June 30, 756 - or 93 per cent - were awaiting orthopaedic surgery.

The health board had planned - and was on course - to wipe out treatment waits of more than 36 weeks by the end of last March.

But more than 900 operations had to be cancelled during the final five weeks of the financial year, to March 31, due to extremely poor, and cold, weather, which came on top of ongoing and already very high winter demand.

That left a backlog of hundreds of cases, along with others coming onto waiting lists. Though some progress has been made since April, there remains much to do.

Health board consultants will carry out the operations in the mobile unit, which is being installed at the front of the Royal Gwent.

When it is ready, it will operate from 8am-6pm.

Due to the siting of the mobile unit, four parking spaces for the disabled will be re-provided close to their current positions.