The Royal Oldham Hospital could soon see big changes.
A specialist health unit in Oldham may be relocated to Manchester to help relieve pressure on an ‘overcrowded’ and underperforming A&E department.
The Victoria Breast Unit, a dedicated centre for diagnosing breast cancer, could soon be moved to North Manchester General Hospital. The vacated wing will make way for a new Urgent Treatment Centre at Royal Oldham.
The £1.4m move comes as Oldham’s is currently seeing ‘more emergency attendances than at any other Greater Manchester site’. The department had more than 73,000 visits between June to December 2025.
The hospital’s A&E has previously been slammed for its ‘corridor care’ and long queues of ambulances waiting to hand over patients. It was ordered to make ‘rapid’ improvements by government watchdog CQC last year.
A report outlining the reasons for the move said: “The department is frequently overcrowded and this leads to a poorer patient experience and an increase in potential harms.
“In order to deliver [a new Urgent Treatment Centre] this requires the movement of the Victoria Breast Unit from the Royal Oldham Hospital to Manchester Foundation Trust’s North Manchester General Hospital site. This enables urgent care services to be delivered from the footprint that will be vacated.”
The report claims the move would be the ‘quickest and simplest solution’ to create the much-needed new unit. Details of how the move would take place, and what disruption it could cause to outpatients using the Victoria Breast Unit have not been released yet.
Oldham town hall will discuss the move at a health scrutiny meeting next week.
Councillor Barbara Brownridge, Cabinet Member for Health and Social Care, told the LDRS: “We need to recognise the pressure our hospital remains under at the moment and any proposals to help ease that pressure and improve the speed at which people are seen is definitely to be welcomed.
“The services currently provided in the Victoria Breast Unit are not run by the Northern Care Alliance, they are provided by Manchester Foundation Trust so it does also make a lot of sense. However, should it get agreed then I do not underestimate the change it would require for people accessing the current Breast Unit.”
The health trusts were contacted for comment.
