Wrexham Maelor opens 48-bed modular ‘winter ward’ in hospital car park

A 48-bed ward built from factory-made modules in a former staff car park opened at Wrexham Maelor hospital on Monday, six months after the first steel frame arrived and a year after the hospital recorded the worst ambulance handover times in Wales.

The two-storey unit, which cost £9.1m, is intended to take older patients who are medically fit to leave but waiting for care at home or a place in a nursing home, a group that occupied 110 of the hospital’s 640 beds on an average day last winter. By moving them out of the main building, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board hopes to free acute beds and stop the practice of treating patients on trolleys in corridors, which the hospital’s own figures show happened to 1,800 people between December and February.

In September, ambulances waited an average of 2 hours 40 minutes to hand over patients at the Maelor, and 41 waited more than six hours. The Welsh Ambulance Service said the delays had cost it the equivalent of 14 ambulances a day across north Wales.

“This building will not solve the problem, but it gives us 48 beds we did not have, in a place that is better for the patients in them than a ward built for acute medicine,” said the health board’s chief executive, Carys Pugh. “The question we have to answer this winter is whether the beds behind them stay free.”

The ward has single rooms and four-bed bays, a rehabilitation gym and a garden, and will be staffed by 60 nurses, therapists and healthcare assistants, 22 of whom were recruited from the Philippines and India in the summer. Patients will be assessed for discharge every day by a team that includes Wrexham council’s social workers, who have an office on the ground floor.

The hospital, built in 1986 for a population that has since grown by a fifth, is due to be replaced or substantially rebuilt under a Welsh government plan that has been promised, costed and deferred three times since 2018. The modular ward has a planning life of 15 years. “We would rather have a new hospital,” said Marc Jones, a consultant geriatrician who will lead the unit. “We have been told we will get one in the 2030s. This is what we can do in the 2020s.”

Patients’ groups welcomed the beds but questioned the location. The ward is a four-minute walk from the main building under a covered walkway, and the Wrexham branch of Age Cymru said it had raised concerns about moving frail patients between the two in winter. The health board said transfers would be done by porters in wheelchairs or beds and that the walkway was heated.

Wrexham council, which is responsible for finding care placements, said it had added 70 domiciliary care workers since April and reduced the number of people waiting for a care package from 210 to 140. The first 20 patients were due to move into the new ward on Tuesday.