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Hospitals of the Future Moving ahead in 2021 This year promises to be another exciting year for our Hospitals of the Future programme. Readers may already know that this is the project to build a new adults’ hospital, and a new Leeds Children’s Hospital on the Leeds General Infirmary site. If you’ve walked up Calverley Street in Leeds recently, you won’t have failed to notice that work has definitely begun on the new hospitals’ development. In December, young patient Violet Grace and former nurse Pat Taylor joined our Chief Executive Julian Hartley and Chair Dame Linda Pollard to mark this huge milestone by waving the green flag to start the demolition of the Old Nurses’ Home. This was the first visible sign that the project has begun and attracted a great deal of media interest, including in the Yorkshire Evening Post and BBC Look North. Demolition on the Leeds General Infirmary site in preparation for the development continues this year. In Spring, our focus will be on appointing the architects and specialist contractors who will work on the new hospitals. Over the summer, the architects and design teams will work closely with us as we continue to engage with patients and staff to develop
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the hospitals’ design further and ensure it reflects their needs. The views of patients and staff are a vitally important aspect of the development, to ensure the hospitals work in the best way possible for them.
Building the Leeds Way The Trusts’s wider programme to transform healthcare facilities for patients and staff,
known as Building the Leeds Way, will also see some significant progress this year. In January, demolition starts at St James’s to make way for the building of a new Pathology laboratory that will serve the Trust and hospitals across West Yorkshire and Harrogate. This is a really exciting development that will benefit patients across the region. Building work on the new laboratory is expected to begin later this year and be completed in 2023.
