Almost 10,000 NHS patients have been through the doors of the Newcastle Westgate Cataract Centre since the NHS facility opened last July.
The Westgate Road centre - run by the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust - has the capacity to see up to 1,000 patients a month, and this has been vital in bringing down huge waiting lists in the city. One of those patients, pensioner Doris McGuire, 86, was even featured on the Geordie Hospital TV show.
At its peak, 6,000 people were waiting for cataract procedures in the city. Since the centre has been open, 9,500 people have been through its doors for a procedure.
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With the NHS still under extreme pressure, hospital trust chief executive Dame Jackie Daniel has written of how despite the "extreme impact" of Covid-19 on staff and patients, the cataract centre has been a success story over the past year. This has been much needed - last summer the more than half of the trust's patients who were waiting for more than a year for procedures ophthalmology patients.
Dame Jackie highlighted how improvements to the cataract service - including but not limited to the new facility - had hugely improved patient experience. She said thousands of patients, like Doris, had been seen and discharged within an hour.
She said: "It’s a great example of how a service had been completely re-engineered to improve efficiency, safety and patient flow Cataract operations are one of the most common procedures in the NHS, but previously there wasn’t a streamlined pathway for patients, and they would often spend up to five hours at hospital for each procedure, so even before Covid this was an area where we could improve."
Dame Jackie said that persuading the older and often more vulnerable patients waiting for cataract procedures had not always been straightforward. She added: "As the majority of patients were elderly, the team found that even once lockdowns had been lifted, patients were still frightened to attend the hospital.
"Following improvements, over 9,500 patients have been treated and discharged home, each within an hour of arriving. They are seen by a named nurse who accompanies them through their stay and have a much lower risk of infection due to the continuous patient flow through the building from front door through theatre and to discharge – all providing a positive patient experience.
"What is important is that it’s not just the new facility that has caused this improvement. The team have undertaken continuous cycles of improvement so that they can increase the list size, support staff development and respond to the regular patient feedback they receive."
Along with the cataract centre, Dame Jackie highlighted how dermatology and the Newcastle Dental Hospital were also "success stories" - though she warned about the pressure NHS services remained under. She said that with the coming winter pressures, potential further Covid-19 waves and the cost-of-living-crisis, services were likely to come under further strain.
"We need to look at our challenges differently but maintain our laser focus on high quality care," she added.
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