The East Midlands Planned Care Centre will open at the Leicester General Hospital on 9 December, and will play a key role in reducing the number of people with long waits for an appointment or treatment.
The EMPCC will enable us to continue to deliver planned care even during the busiest periods for the parts of our hospital which focus on urgent and emergency care.
If you have an appointment at East Midlands Planned Care Centre and need to know more about your visit, please visit the patient information page.
Read about EMPCC in the media
We were delighted to host the Leicester Mercury and BBC East Midlands Today recently, as they got a sneak peek at the East Midlands Planned Planned Care Centre.
Reducing waiting times and waiting lists
Targeted action here in Leicester means we have made the most progress of any Trust in the country over the last 12 months. The biggest improvements are in the elimination of two year waits and 77% reduction in waits of over a year.
The EMPCC is part of UHL’s strategy to continue to reduce waiting times, which the most recent NHS data (August, 2024) shows is already having a significant impact on patients.
Compared with two years ago, the Trust has reduced the average wait for treatment from 19.9 weeks to 15.2 weeks. The number of people waiting a year or more for treatment is down 88% and the total waiting list is down by 11%.
What does the EMPCC do?
The East Midlands Planned Care Centre is a state-of-the-art facility designed to treat a patients who need relatively straightforward procedures, such as tonsillectomies and cataract removal, as well as consulting rooms and procedure rooms for seeing patients who need non-surgical care.
- two operating theatres
- 14 outpatient rooms,
- four procedure rooms,
- dedicated pre-operative and recovery areas,
- medical daycase unit
One theatre opened in 2023, and when the EMPCC is fully open in December 2024, it will provide around 100,000 appointments each year.
Services working out of the East Midlands Planned Care Centre
- Ear, Nose and Throat
- General surgery
- Gynaecology
- Ophthalmology
- Urology
This construction of the centre has been supported by NHS England. Flexible spaces and systems
The centre also brings with it the flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of our population, as the space is designed specifically to be used by many different clinical teams.
Cutting-edge digital services will also help to make the EMPCC more efficient and flexible, enabling those teams to easily access the data they need.
Self check-in kiosks
Patients will be able to use self check-in kiosks, which provide directions in English and the five most-requested languages from UHL’s translation service:
- Gujarati
- Punjabi
- Polish
- Bengali
- Hindi
If you’d like to get in touch and let us know what you think, drop us a line at PatientEngagement@uhl-tr.nhs.uk
Public information events
We held two free events in August to enable the public to find out more about the new state-of-the-art East Midlands Planned Care Centre (EMPCC). This major development at Leicester General Hospital will play a key role in reducing our waiting lists for patients’ treatments, and we want to ensure you have the opportunity to find out more and ask any questions you may have.
- An in-person meeting took place on August 2
- An online forum took place on Tuesday August 20
Thank you to all who took part in these events.
You can find the Full Business Case for the EMPCC below.