New 'superward' is a real home from home

A HUGELY impressive £6.5-million new ward at St Helens Hospital is now open... and patients can look forward to swish new facilities which have come a long way from the old-style wards.

The 60-bed Elyn Lodge wing is the first step in a £250 million masterplan to radically transform St Helens' hospitals and carry health services forward into the 21st century.

Designed for patients who are recovering from strokes or serious injury and illness, the ward at St Helens Hospital, Peasley Cross, includes cutting edge medical equipment and patient rooms, equipped with en-suite bathrooms, you would expect to find offered by private healthcare.

The spacious site is a far cry from the old-fashioned 'Nightingale' wards where dozens of beds stand side by side. Government objectives want to remove these open-plan wards in favour of individual rooms to offer privacy and dignity to patients.

Such targets are clearly fulfilled in the design of Elyn Lodge, where the 60 beds fall into either single or four-bed rooms on the ground floor Seddon Ward and the first floor Duffy Ward.

Patients have access to personal screen terminals through which they can access television and radio. Telephones are also attached to the terminals, meaning patients can call relatives and friends from their sick beds.

The wards also include a series of facilities to help recovering patients back into a routine of daily life. Outside the private patient rooms is a seated communal areas where patients can socialise.

There's an exercise room where patients will be given physio and helped to regain movement and fitness, while outside is a therapy garden, where a patient's mobility can be assessed by medics.

A hi-tech activities daily living suite is another feature. Patients can be monitored trying to complete 12 routine tasks like cooking and cleaning.

During the next seven years the huge redevelopment being rolled out across our hospitals at Whiston, St Helens, and Newton, will see similar wards being built while old-fashioned structures become part of health history