As the Duke of Edinburgh cut the ribbon on the Swindon's new Great Western Hospital, Swindon Primary Care Trust is already planning for the extension of the hospital.

A new £27 million diagnostic and treatment centre has been approved and looks set to be completed by the end of 2004.

The DTC will be a separate unit catering purely for elective, pre-booked operations.

This means that patients going into hospital for planned procedures will not have their operations cancelled if emergencies come up.

It should therefore reduce waiting times and the incidence of cancelled or postponed operations.

By providing a separate centre for routine operations, the DTC will reduce waiting times for operations, reduce cancellations and enable the main part of the hospital to treat the emergency admissions which have increased faster than national trends in the last few years.

The centre will have 118 beds and five extra operating theatres, and will be able to perform more than 5,500 operations a year, which should reduce waiting times by up to six months.

It will also reduce waiting times for emergency admissions to a maximum of four hours.

Sonia Mills, the chief executive of Swindon and Marlborough Trust, said: "I am very excited by the announcement of the next phase of development of the hospital.

"It has only been made possible by the significant and sustained additional resources going in to the NHS.

"There was much criticism of the trust's decision to build the new hospital on the Commonhead site, but this has proved to be a key factor in making this much-needed development possible."

The DTC is part of a series of new centres announced by the Government early this year, including ones scheduled to be built in Bath and Bristol.

It will be built under a private finance initiative and managed by the Swindon and Marlborough NHS Trust.