A £33m COVID facility at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff is under construction

Cases are expect to continue to rise


In April of this year, the Principality Stadium was transformed into a field hospital for COVID-19 patients in Wales. However, it only held forty-six patients, causing the Welsh Government to decommission it at a time when cases were declining.

As we now approach Winter, cases are doubling each day. Whilst this was predicted, it has arrived far more quickly than the scientific experts had expected. Due to this, a new four-hundred bed facility is being built in order to ease pressure on the NHS.

Alongside the new modular facility at the University Hospital of Wales, additional beds are being made available at existing NHS sites in Cardiff – making a total of eight-hundred extra NHS beds available this winter.

Chief Executive at Cardiff and Vale UHB, Len Richards, said: “This will support our planning for increased capacity of up to 400 additional patients in response to the current modelling predictions and a second wave of Covid-19.”

“The build will be aligned to the decommissioning programme of the Dragon’s Heart Hospital at the Principality Stadium which we will have vacated by the end of October and will enable the WRU to start making their own plans at the stadium.”

“As a health service we will take on board all of the learning from Dragon’s Heart Hospital in terms of design and clinical requirements for a temporary surge hospital and work to the national modelling requirements.”

The Health minister of Wales, Vaughan Gething, added that “as we approach this winter, and with the recent rise in Covid-19 cases, it is highly likely health and social care services will require additional capacity to manage increasing demand for services.

“We must ensure we retain access to sufficient additional bed capacity to manage any increase in admissions of patients with Covid-19.

“We are now more than six months into the Covid-19 pandemic. We learn more about the virus on a daily basis and how best to secure positive outcomes for Wales.

“Based on data modelling and ongoing learning from the first peak, health boards were asked to retain five-thousand beds across Wales to enable safe management of a potential realistic worst-case scenario caused by a spike in emergency admissions to hospital beds.”

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