Our services at Pinderfields
The Pinderfields Hospital building was opened in 2011 and is the largest of the Trust’s three hospitals.
Our services at Pinderfields
The Pinderfields Hospital building was opened in 2011 and is the largest of the Trust’s three hospitals. Pinderfields is the Trust’s main site for patients who need acute care and provides a range of inpatient, outpatient, diagnostic and maternity services. The hospital provides both urgent and emergency care as well as services such as elective surgery, which are planned in advance with patients.
Pinderfields is the busiest hospital within the Trust. In any one year we may have over 127,000 attendances to our A&E and over 58,000 emergency admissions. We provide more than a quarter of a million outpatient appointments at the hospital across a range of medical and surgical specialties.
Our Critical Care Unit at Pinderfields provides intensive care to our most unwell patients. Staffed by specialist critical care nurses, the unit has a CQC rating of Outstanding for the compassionate care they provide to the patients and their families.
Pinderfields is also home to our A&E dedicated to children, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which works closely with our Children’s Assessment Unit. Staffed by specialist paediatric doctors and nurses, they work closely together to treat our youngest patients and get them home if possible, avoiding unnecessary and potentially stressful short-stay admissions. All our children’s services take a family-centred approach to care. We also employ play specialists who are devoted to helping children understand any procedures they may have to undertake and to make any hospital stay as positive as possible.
As part of our commitment to providing the least stressful experience possible for our patients who have been referred for possible cancer, we have been transforming how we offer services in recent years. For example, we provide a one-stop service in urology, reducing anxious waits for tests for patients, 70% of whom have been able to be discharged at their first appointment. We also run joint cancer clinics so that patients can see a specialist and an oncologist on the same day instead of weeks apart as may have been the case previously. Pinderfields also hosts the Macmillan Information Pod, offering support, advice and information for anyone affected by cancer.
The Eye Centre
The Eye Centre, a £5 million purpose-built building designed with the help of patients and staff as part of the reconfiguration of our hospital services, is one of the busiest ophthalmology departments in the region. The introduction of rapid access clinics, seeing 40 acute patients per day, means we are getting our patients to the most appropriate staff and providing treatment much more quickly.
Technological innovation
Mid Yorkshire is also embracing technological innovation in order to improve our services. By offering an e-consultation service in over 14 specialties, we have prevented approximately 4000 people having to attend outpatient appointments. We also run a virtual fracture clinic, answering questions and giving reassurance to patients who then don’t have to make the journey to the hospital site.
In April 2019, Pinderfields Hospital took delivery of a brand new, state of the art, da Vinci X Robot, which will allow our surgical teams to further expand their capacity to provide keyhole specialist surgery for complex, life-threatening conditions and to perform more complex procedures with a few small incisions, leading to reduced blood loss and infection, faster recovery times and a reduced length of stay in hospital.
Adults and Paediatrics Burn Service
Pinderfields Hospital is home to the region’s specialist burns service. The unit treats patients with burn injuries and skin loss conditions of all levels of complexity from all over Yorkshire, Humberside and North Lincolnshire, serving a population of 5 million, as well as taking patients from other regions and sometimes overseas.
Our dedicated team includes surgeons, intensivists, anaesthetists, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, psychologists and other staff, all of whom who are passionate about delivering high quality burns care. We treat acute burn injuries, complex skin loss conditions in adult and children, and long-term scar problems including patients with complex and specialist reconstructive needs. We are one of the few centres in the North of England who practice enzymatic burns debridement, leading the way nationally in treating critically ill and major burns in this manner, and we carry out a range of reconstructive activity, including tissue expanders for post burn hair loss and specialist burned breast reconstruction.
We are the only burn centre in Yorkshire and the Humber providing burns surgical training and our team of specialised burns intensivists provide training to anaesthetists and intensive care doctors from across the Yorkshire region. We also conduct burn courses for GPs. Our expertise has been drawn on to develop national guidelines on burns and our teams routinely present at national and international events. The service has close links with Huddersfield University, with whom we are collaborating on research projects.
The Mid Yorkshire Burns Club, set up to provide support for young people with burns, was awarded the Duke of York’s community initiative in 2018 and our paediatric burns play specialist was awarded a British Empire Medal for her services to children with severe burns in Yorkshire.
Yorkshire Regional Spinal Injuries Centre
Our Regional Spinal Injuries Centre at Pinderfields is one of only 11 specialist spinal injuries centres within the UK. Serving a population of approximately 7 million across the Yorkshire and Humber region, the unit provides inpatient care for those with a spinal cord injury or non-progressive spinal cord disease, as well as providing life-long support to patients via an established outpatient and outreach service.
The state of the art, purpose-built unit has dedicated rehabilitation and therapy facilities, including a fully equipped gym, one of the best hydrotherapy pools in the region, conditioning suite, occupational therapy assessment, treatment and education areas.
Our dedicated multidisciplinary team consists of nurses, consultants (spinal rehabilitation and urology), medical staff, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, psychology, outreach and liaison. The team works closely with patients and their families or carers to undertake rehabilitation following a goal-oriented process. The unit is supported by well-established charities including SPINE, SURF, SIA, Aspire and Backup, who provide physical, social, educational and psychological support to our patients and families.