New Cross Hospital patients heading to Cannock

Up to 10,000 patients a year will have elective surgery at Cannock Chase Hospital under the proposals.

It is anticipated that the trust which runs New Cross will take over the running of Cannock full time when services from Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust are divided up, as revealed in the Express & Star in June.

But chiefs at New Cross have already put the wheels in motion and will begin moving its patients to the under-used Cannock Chase Hospital, to free up vital space at the Wednesfield site.

Discussions are also ongoing to set up a free shuttle bus service to take patients from Wolverhampton to Cannock.

The proposals are yet to be finalised but chiefs stressed the transport would be in place by the time the new system is launched.

Staff from New Cross will also move to Cannock as part of the plan.

It comes as New Cross deals with thousands more patients from the Cannock area.

Chief executive David Loughton said the extra patients amounted to around £35 million of work each year.

He claimed that with New Cross completely full, the only alternative to accrue more space would be to buy capacity in the private sector.

Mr Loughton said: "I'm looking to move some elective capacity to Cannock as soon as possible to take some pressure off here.

"It'll just be elective surgery but we might be talking about 10,000 cases a year.

"That will free up one ward here, maybe two, which means we can deal with the emergency medicine patients better than we can now.

"I fear we'll start to struggle in January as we've got medical patients in orthopaedic beds.

"Staff will move over as well and we're talking weeks rather than months.

"It will involve transferring equipment although the theatres over there are of good standard.

"We've had a bad run in A&E and we've got increased numbers of people coming from the Cannock area.

"It just makes sense to do this as soon as possible."

Equipment will also be transferred to Cannock, although Mr Loughton said theatres in the hospital were upgraded just six years ago and were well equipped.

The final proposals for Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust will be put before Parliament on Wednesday, for the Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt to approve.

Cannock Hospital is currently 40 per cent unoccupied.

A £70m downgrade of services at Cannock Chase and Stafford hospitals has been recommended by a team appointed by health watchdog Monitor.

It is anticipated that around £30m will be spent upgrading Cannock Chase Hospital.