Evelina London's new day surgery centre featured on BBC

Dr Claire Lemer, Clinical Director, with TV presenter Dom Littlewood

The construction of our state-of-the-art children’s surgery centre received a helping hand from TV presenter Dom Littlewood as part of a BBC programme about the construction industry during the pandemic.

The BBC programme, ‘Dom Digs In’, followed Morgan Sindall, the company who are building the new centre at Evelina London which will provide surgery for more children and young people who don’t need to stay overnight. Providing a behind-the-scenes insight into how this vital hospital building is put together the programme is an exciting opportunity to learn more about Evelina London and why we are expanding our hospital so we can care for even more children and young people now and in the future.

Dr Claire Lemer, Clinical Director at Evelina London was interviewed on the programme, and said:

“We have an increasing number of children who need to have operations, and one of the things that stops us doing that is not having enough theatre space.  So having the having the right modern space is incredibly important.”

The new day surgery centre will mean we can offer an additional 2,300 surgeries per year, it also frees up space in our hospital theatres and wards so that we can provide even more specialist care for the growing number of children and families who need us. It is due to open in 2022 and is being built right next to our existing children’s hospital.

The programme, which is available to watch on BBC iPlayer, was filmed in February this year and aims to highlight how important it was that construction continued over the last year.

Since we opened our children's hospital in 2005, the number of children and young people who are cared for across London and the south east has more than doubled. We have exciting and ambitious plans to grow our hospital into a world-leading centre of life-changing care for even more children, young people and their families.

A bigger hospital will mean even more children and young people can be treated and more leading edge treatments developed. More care will also be provided for the growing number of children with complex conditions and it will allow us to bring more services together in one place.

Find out more about our day surgery centre, and our plans to create a bigger and even better children’s hospital.