The ground-breaking ceremony for Sunderland's new eye hospital has been taking place.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 I'm Chief Executive at South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust and I'm delighted
00:04 to welcome you all here today. Now I had two speeches today, one was the long version but
00:12 given the weather I'm going for the shortened version and we can hopefully dodge the showers.
00:18 So thank you very much for coming onto site today and this will be the site of our brand
00:23 new eye hospital for Sunderland.
00:26 Okay so how excited are you to be here today for the groundbreaking ceremony?
00:30 It's very exciting actually, it's one of the best days of my NHS career actually to see
00:34 a new hospital being built in Sunderland. It will change the kind of services that we
00:39 provide in the eye infirmary.
00:42 And so what sort of facilities are going to happen in terms of these changes?
00:44 So eye infirmary is brilliant, it's a regional institute of centre for excellence but the
00:51 facility was built almost 75 years ago. The staff and the services that we provide are
00:56 really good but it needs to match, the physical infrastructure needs to match the futuristic
01:01 services that we want to provide. So the new eye infirmary will have the facilities that
01:07 are built to cater to the needs of the patients that are needed and the services and the treatment
01:13 that are changing over a period of time. So the hospital that was built a long time ago
01:19 had areas that we don't really need anymore and kind of wards that were built in, that
01:24 were a long time ago built to last for patients staying in for a long time. The new treatments,
01:30 the patients don't stay in the hospital very long so all that kind of change, you really
01:35 need a modern set up to cater to the modern treatments that are happening in the ophthalmology
01:40 and the eye care.
01:41 I know Sunderland has been a leader in eye care in the UK for a long time with the hospital,
01:46 hopefully this will make this continue?
01:48 Absolutely, Sunderland is always one of the very few stand alone eye hospitals in the
01:54 country and it's a regional centre for excellence and we hope to build on that and become kind
02:01 of a leader in the care of ophthalmology and eye diseases in the region and nationally.
02:05 You're going to hold the shovels up to me. If we get a little bit more in there that
02:13 would be fantastic. That's hard ground. I know I get the easy one. I know I get the
02:19 hard ground.
02:20 Okay then Michael, how excited are you to be here today for the groundbreaking ceremony?
02:26 Absolutely overwhelmed, it's been a long time coming. The rumour mill has been turning for
02:31 years about this and to see it actually come to fruition is just brilliant, absolutely
02:36 fantastic.
02:37 Obviously you're currently a patient at the eye hospital in Sunderland. These brand new
02:41 facilities, what difference do you think that's going to make for you as a patient?
02:45 Well for me personally I think the main one is the location because as much as I love
02:49 the current hospital, it's wonderful, but it can be a bit awkward to get to sometimes,
02:56 especially from the city centre. So now that it's actually in the city centre it will just
03:01 be outstanding, absolutely amazing.
03:03 How's the feeling, you know, you've made the first dig with the spade for this process?
03:06 It was an honour, it was a real honour.
03:10 It's been historic.
03:11 [Music]
03:13 [Music]
03:15 [Music]
03:17 [Music]
03:18 (upbeat music)
03:20 (upbeat music)
03:23 (upbeat music)
03:25 (upbeat music)
03:28 (upbeat music)
03:31 (upbeat music)
03:36 (upbeat music)
03:42 (upbeat music)
03:48 (upbeat music)
03:55 (upbeat music)
03:57 (upbeat music)
04:00 (upbeat music)
04:02 (upbeat music)
04:05 (upbeat music)
04:08 [BLANK_AUDIO]