BURY Hospice plans a £200,000 extension to its Dumers Lane premises to boost patient-care services.

The work is a prelude to long-term proposals to double bed capacity at the site and create a separate day care centre.

The hospice has applied to Bury Council planners for the go-ahead for a two-storey extension. The hospice chief executive, Mr Walter Brooks, said: "The main purpose of the extension is to give us a larger kitchen and a separate dining room.

"We will also be providing a training room which would be a boost in enabling us to give vital training to both the clinical and medical professionals." If the application is approved the work would start immediately and should hopefully be completed some time around mid-November.

Looking to the longer term, Mr Brooks disclosed: "Once we have this building, we then intend to start planning for an effective doubling of bed capacity and the creation of a separate day care centre, which should hopefully be up and running by the year 2000 or very soon after that.

"That's dependent on a whole lot of factors, not just about funding but the availability of land."

The hospice, open for six years, caters for 24 day-care patients and five in-patients each week.

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