A NEW women and children centre planned for the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro is set to be completed a year earlier than expected.

The £100million centre will be dedicated in providing services for women and children and will also be a new main entrance for the hospital.

Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust (RCHT) is in the process of drawing up an outline planning application for the new building to be submitted in the next few weeks.

And it has been revealed that the new building will have to be completed by 2024 – a year earlier than originally planned.

The new centre was part of a national programme of hospital upgrades announced by the Prime Minister in 2019 worth £850m nationwide.

RCHT is set to receive £99.9m for the women and children centre and said that it was the biggest ever single investment made in Cornish health services.

The new centre will house services which are currently based in the Princess Alexandra Wing at the Truro hospital.

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It will be located between the existing Tower Block and Trelawny Wing at the hospital and have services including maternity, neonatal care and gynaecology.

Under the current plans the outline planning application will be submitted later this month and an outline business case will be submitted to the Government in October.

It is hoped that construction could start on site in December 2021 with an aim of being completed by December 2024.

Dulcie Tudor, Cornwall councillor for Threemilestone and Gloweth, said: “I’m obviously more than happy to support the outline planning application for the new Women and Children’s Services building to help ensure the project is complete by its new deadline of April 2024.

“More than 4,000 mums and babies are cared for at the hospital every year and this planned state of the art facility will deliver new ways of working for hospital staff, new ways of caring, and new cutting edge technologies that mean mums and babies in Cornwall get the best care possible on a par with the best in the country.

“The Royal Cornwall Hospital falls within my councillor area and I’ve been assured the construction plan is designed so there’ll be no significant loss of parking while works are ongoing and no disruption to traffic at peak travel times.

“In the long term, although it’s not been formally signed off by the Trust Board, there are plans for a new multi-storey car park, predominantly for patient use at the hospital, which is another project I’m sure we can all get behind.”