ICU expansion allows more elective surgery
A 30 per cent increase in the number of intensive care beds at Wellington Hospital will see fewer non-urgent surgeries postponed.
The multimillion-dollar upgrade, which has been two years in the planning, officially opens tomorrow with Capital & Coast District Health Board (CCDHB) staff confident it will help future-proof the unit until about 2022.
‘‘We knew population-wise that we would eventually need to increase the numbers in intensive care back in 2009 and that’s turned out to be the case,’’ ICU charge nurse manager Stephen James said.
He said the staff were excited to get into the new space, which has been kitted out with the latest medical technology available, as well as a number of new isolation rooms.
The expansion meant converting about 270 square metres of ICU office space in the main building into bed space and shifting offices out to the junior doctors’ lounge and sleeping quarters.
The ICU has more than 1600 admissions each year, 700 of which are typically elective surgery patients.
Elective surgery is anything that treats a non-urgent condition and can include anything from surgery to treat cardiac issues to mastectomies and cataract removal. Roughly 160 elective patients had had surgery deferred in 2017 – double that of the previous year – making the upgrade a necessity.
‘‘The extra beds gives us the capacity to admit more patients to intensive care so we’re able to do more elective surgery without worrying about where we’re going to admit the other acute patients that we have,’’ ICU clinical leader Dr Peter Hicks said.
The changes to the unit have taken the entire ICU from 18 beds to 24, however, the rollout of the new beds would be gradual.
‘‘We aren’t staffing all the beds at the start. Three of six will be staffed initially and we’ll build up to all of them over the next couple of years. All up, an extra 30 fulltime
‘‘The extra beds gives us the capacity to admit more patients to intensive care so we’re able to do more elective surgery.’’ ICU clinical leader Dr Peter Hicks
nursing staff would be required to staff the larger unit as about five nurses were required for each bed on a 24-hour basis.’’
Approval for the expansion was granted in June last year with work starting in October.
While the exact value of the expansion was commercially sensitive, the build cost came out of the DHB’s existing annual capital budget – which was between $25 million and $30m. Each bed space within the new unit costs about $1m per year, working out to be $3300 per day, per patient.
While a significant cost, Hicks said it was important the unit had everything it needed to keep people alive for however long they, and their families, were in the ICU.
The average time spent in the unit was 44 hours; however, in the past year, seven patients stayed longer than a month.