Published on: 17 November 2022

Dear colleague,

We are delighted to let you know about plans to create a new dedicated sterile drug manufacturing facility in the region which will support our existing hospital network.

Through the region’s Provider Collaborative, we have successfully secured £29.7 million of national funding to build a brand new aseptic facility.

This means we will be able to greatly increase capacity and create our own sustainable supply chain of medicines to support every hospital alongside our existing aseptic units.

Injectable, or aseptic, medicines are a vital part of safe and high-quality patient care.  The region’s NHS currently prepares around 4 million doses each year.  

The new facility will be built at Seaton Delaval in Northumberland.  It will work in a hub and spoke model with existing aseptic units, many of which are already working at, or set to reach, full capacity over the next ten years.

This development means we will be able to achieve much greater gains in manufacturing efficiency by doing things on a much bigger scale where this makes sense whilst continuing to operate from existing local units.

Once built, the new drug manufacturing hub will provide a first class training environment and become a learning academy for staff working within the region’s NHS and for trainee pharmacists and other scientific and technical staff involved in drug production.  

We anticipate some major savings for the NHS by being able to produce more chemotherapy drugs and injectable nutrition medication ‘in-house’ without having to outsource these.  There will also be benefits in term of freeing up more nursing time by supplying more ready-made intravenous antibiotics directly to hospital wards (and thereby allowing staff to focus on providing other clinical care).

Read more about the development here

We hope you agree that this is a fantastic development for the North East and North Cumbria.  

Work will now get underway to develop more detailed plans for the new facility including a projected timescale for work to begin.  

We look forward to keeping you all up-to-date as work progresses. 

Yours sincerely 
Ken Bremner, MBE 
Chair – North East and North Cumbria Provider Collaborative                              
 

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