On Friday last week, I was delighted to join NHS staff and Gordon Birtwistle, the former Liberal Democrat MP for Burnley, at Burnley General Hospital.
We were there to mark the ground-breaking to start construction of the Hospital’s £15.8 million Phase 8 development, money that Gordon and I secured back in 2015 in a successful cross-party campaign. It has taken longer than we all would have liked to move from the government money being awarded to spades in the ground but it is an important step towards improving our local NHS facilities.
As the Chief Executive of the East Lancashire Hospital Trust, Kevin McGee explained on the day, the Phase 8 development will lead to modern, high quality facilities for existing services and opportunities to improve the way services are delivered in Burnley and Pendle.
A new Ophthalmology Centre and twenty surgical clinics are the centrepieces but there will be plenty of other improvements including a dedicated blood room, which the hospital doesn’t currently have.
Work is due to complete in autumn next year and I want to put on record how well I think Kevin and his team are working to improve Burnley General. Before I was elected, Burnley Hospital lost its Accident and Emergency department in 2007 and, in my view partially as a result, hospitals across East Lancashire went into emergency measures in 2013.
However, they are now rated good and we are seeing a series of important investments being made. The new £9 million Urgent Care Centre opened in 2014 and last year we saw the new children’s outpatients department open as well as chemotherapy and breast care facility. They are also addressing concerns about on-site parking with 100 extra spaces due later this year.
There are few things more important to our area than its health services. It’s clear that things were going backwards at Burnley General not that long ago, but I do believe that the situation has now been turned around.
Whilst Gordon Birtwistle and I may have secured the government funding for this, the real credit for the transformation rests with our local NHS staff. As we approach the NHS 70th birthday celebrations in July, we should all put on record our thanks to NHS staff for the incredible work they do.