{"id":602441,"date":"2026-09-01T09:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T09:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/602441\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T09:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T09:06:09","slug":"87m-surgical-centre-opens-aimed-at-cutting-somerset-waiting-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/602441\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a387m surgical centre opens aimed at cutting Somerset waiting lists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A new \u00a387m surgical centre has opened at a Somerset hospital, with NHS leaders hoping it will reduce waiting lists by increasing capacity and improving patient flow.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The King&#8217;s Building at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton brings operating theatres, endoscopy, admissions and intensive care together under one roof. Somerset NHS Foundation Trust said it was a major transformation of surgical care.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The centre includes eight operating theatres, up from five, six endoscopy rooms and a 22-bed intensive care unit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Dr Helen Hopwood said it offered a &#8220;double bonus&#8221; of increased capacity and efficiency, allowing more procedures and reducing the need for patients to move around the hospital.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We&#8217;ve got two bonuses here. One is that we&#8217;ve increased our capacity, so we have additional operating theatre sessions that we can offer. But also we can improve the efficiency because we are now able to offer surgical pathways that run end to end within one clinical area,&#8221; said Hopwood, consultant anaesthetist and associate medical director for surgery.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The building&#8217;s opening also replaces clinical areas housed in some of the oldest parts of the hospital estate.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Hopwood said the previous intensive care unit was located in buildings dating back to World War Two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new \u00a387m surgical centre has opened at a Somerset hospital, with NHS leaders hoping it will reduce&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-602441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}