St James’s Hospital in Leeds opens new £8.5m eye clinic with 108 rooms - look inside

Located inside St James’s Hospital, the purpose-built department cost £8.5million to build and features 108 rooms, including consultation rooms, central diagnostic rooms, a refractive unit, as well as a virtual clinic room. It follows months of consultation with patients to create a design and layout that meets the needs of partially-sighted patients and visitors.

The new department, in the hospital’s Gledhow wing, is a short walk from the old location in Chancellor’s wing. It has larger rooms, improved access and clearer wayfinding, with wide corridors and lots of natural light to make the clinic easy to navigate.

Ophthalmology is the largest outpatient department at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, treating more than 100,000 patients per year. The Trust hopes the new clinic will help to cut the outpatient backlog caused by the pandemic.

Craige Richardson, director of estates and facilities at the Trust, said: “This is an exciting moment for what is our largest outpatient department in Leeds. We see a significant number of eye patients every week and this purpose-built environment will provide a setting that is both cutting-edge in its design and sympathetic to the needs of visually-impaired patients.”

The Trust’s clinical director of head and neck services, Jonathan Bilmen, added: “I’m really proud to see the completion of this state-of-the-art facility which will massively improve patient care in Ophthalmology outpatients. This is the culmination of an £8.5m investment and a huge amount of planning and multidisciplinary input to ensure we deliver the best in care.”