North Cumbria Integrated Care is currently developing the UTC on the Cumberland Infirmary site in Carlisle.
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An artist’s impression of how the new Urgent Treatment Centre could look. (Image: North Cumbria Integrated Care)
It is hoped that the UTC, which will open in the new year, will take pressure of Carlisle’s challenged Accident and Emergency Department.
UTCs are the right point of contact for patients who need urgent medical help, when the illness or injury is not life-threatening.
Emergency care staff at Carlisle are currently seeing a large number of patients, some of which are seriously unwell and some who could be treated elsewhere, this affects the level of care staff are able to provide to patients.
Interim Chief Executive Trudie Davies said: “Our A&E at Carlisle is not the biggest space and at the minute, if you went in there, you’d find some really sick people and some people with much lower acuity illnesses or injuries.”
Ms Davies said that the ambition is “that if we can split those, so our lower acuity patients can be streamed into the UTC, it gives our highly skilled staff who really need to be intervening in the sickest patients, a little bit more breathing space and time to focus on those really sick patients.”
Patients who are not as acutely unwell “would have specialist nurses and Primary Care, who are specialised in addressing their needs. So hopefully the experience for both groups of patients would be better.”
But in order to take pressure off the A&E department, bosses must address NCIC’s wider staffing challenges.
A look inside the new Urgent Treatment Centre, which is under construction on the Cumberland Infirmary site (Image: NCIC)
It comes as directors consider “a way forward” for the Keswick UTC, which has had to close a number of times recently due to staffing shortages.
Ms Davies said: “It’s a microcosm of the staffing challenges that we face as an organisation. There’s only one set of skills and we need to make it go around to the best of our ability.
“We also need to make sure that we offer fair pay to people who work in these environments and trying to keep that balance, is really really difficult.
She said: “So we need to understand, what is the best offer we can do across all our functions and how would that work to make sure there’s broadest cover from the skills that we’ve got?”
“My worry is, if people turn-up there (Keswick) and it’s not open, they might not get the treatment that they need really quickly.”
The Urgent Treatment Centre in Keswick. (Image: NQ)
She said that the challenge for decisionmakers is to consider how they ensure NCIC has either “a really robust” and permanent workforce “or that we open it in a much more robust way.
“It might be for reduced hours or over a different period so that we can make sure the public know what’s on-offer while we do this bigger recruitment piece.”
She said that the UTC is “absolutely key” in the trust’s efforts to “pull patients out of the main Accident and Emergency Department, we are going to have to put resources in there.”
Construction on the Carlisle UTC is scheduled for completion by the end of year.