Prime minister Tony Blair opened it last year. Health secretary Alan Milburn chose it as the symbolically important venue from which to announce the NHS national plan earlier this year.
The Central Middlesex Ambulatory Care and Diagnostic Centre (ACAD) may not boast the snappiest of names, but such heavyweight political endorsement means it is one of the most fashionable sites in the NHS.
The centre, which is pioneering a revolutionary "production-line" approach to routine operations, even received a citation in the NHS plan as a model of good practice. As a result, dozens of doctors and managers, not to mention ministers from the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, have visited the centre in Park Royal, north-west London, in the past few months.
It easy to see why New Labour has adopted the £19m centre as an icon of NHS modernisation. It promises speedy, bureaucracy-free diagnosis and treatment, providing a greater volume of care, more efficiently. The key to ACAD's success is the way it has "re-engineered" the treatment of patients from diagnosis through to discharge, making the most efficient use of staff, facilities, and technologies.
Dr Giordano Abondatti, ACAD clinical director, says the process of carrying out routine elective operations to treat varicose veins, hernias and the like is similar to running a factory production line. One of the major innovations has been changing the skill mix of the "production-line" workers. Previously rigid traditional demarcations between "nurses' work" and "doctors' work" have been blurred. Acting under agreed protocols, nurses have been trained to carry out procedures previously reserved for doctors such as preoperative assessments, x-rays and electrocardiograms.
Dr Abondatti argues that this allows doctors to target their skills more tightly. "Doctors have monopolised healthcare. But that is like using a bunch of highly trained graduate engineers to assemble Ford Fiestas."
There have been mixed reactions from the staff to the new ways. Nurses have generally been enthusiastic about taking on more clinical responsibilities. Some doctors have been less keen to hand over duties.
But the results have been encouraging, even opening up the tantalising prospect of making that staple of NHS winter crises, cancelled elective operations, a thing of the past. Traditionally district general hospitals have integrated emergency and non-urgent care. This means that at times of high pressure, such as winter flu crises, elective beds are commandeered for emergency work, forcing non-urgent work to be cancelled and inflating waiting lists.
Because ACAD is a stand-alone elective centre, with its own onsite theatre, bed and diagnostic facilities it is barely affected by such pressures. "We did not cancel anybody's operation during this year's winter beds crisis," says ACAD manager Jean Silkoff.
The centre has developed a more flexible, patient-friendly approach. Patients can choose a date for their operations. It runs a "one-stop" breast cancer clinic in which women can be tested and diagnosed during a single visit.
The centre is also demonstrably more efficient. While the cost per patient is the same as a traditional district hospital, its avoidance of cancelled operations means it is treating up to 10% more patients a year.
"We haven't cracked it yet. We are still very much at the beginning," insists Dr Abondatti. But ministers appear to have decided already that it is the way forward. They have ordered a further 19 ACAD-style sites to be built by 2004.
