It’s been a busy time over recent months for the Monklands Replacement Project (MRP) as work continues on the outline business case to take forward our exciting vision for a new University Hospital Monklands (UHM).
Fiona Cowan, MRP clinical lead – nursing, said: “We’re delighted that a picture of how the new UHM could look is really taking shape, and we shared some concept hospital design images in our recent media release and Pulse article. Work on departmental design layouts has progressed well and a sign-off process with stakeholders and staff leads is now being completed.
“The workforce for the new hospital is high on our agenda and bed modelling aligned to staffing requirements has been carried out. We’ve also designed an example recruitment plan for medical workforce requirements and are preparing the same for all the other job families.
“It isn’t just staff at UHM who are supporting the MRP. I’m looking forward to linking with colleagues at University Hospital Wishaw, who’ll be helping us with a study to assess how single rooms impact staff working.”
Fiona continued: “We have an ambition for the new UHM to be Scotland’s first digital hospital – ensuring we use the most modern and appropriate technology for the benefit of patients and staff. We’ll be pushing forward with that vision in the new year and we’ve asked staff from a range of areas if they’d like to join our working group as ‘digital champions’. We’ll also be involving public/patient representatives.
“This futuristic theme is also reflected in the work, spearheaded by the MRP, to design an operational command centre, providing a real-time overview of activity within Lanarkshire’s acute and health & social care services. We’re excited to be visiting Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust to learn more about their command centre model.”
MRP director Graeme Reid added that the project team had played a key role in a recent UHM site service planning event.
He said: “We were delighted to contribute and our team will be a stakeholder in a new group to take forward UHM site planning, with a view to reconfiguration of services on site – mirroring the clinical models for MRP where possible.”
Infection prevention & control (IPC) is also among the MRP’s priorities and its IPC sub-group functions as a decision-making forum and also provides support and assurance to the other sub-groups, which, in turn, feed in to the IPC group with initial strategies, plans and designs.
Graeme noted: “Robust assurance around the MRP is key to our progress so we have created an assurance sub-group to make recommendations to the team.
“These will include internal and external audit processes and lessons learned from other health boards. Importantly, the group will also advise on the requirements of the upcoming review of our outline business case, to be carried out by our partners at NHS Scotland Assure – the new service established to assess the quality and management of healthcare construction projects.”
Full details of the Monklands Replacement Project at www.monklands.scot.nhs.uk.
