About BBCC

Within the Bristol Breast Care Centre at Southmead Hosptial, Bristol, you will find two separate waiting areas, one for Breast Screening and one for the Breast Clinics. There is a vending machine with snacks, tea and coffee available and a cold water machine.

There are 8 surgeons and clinicians and 6 radiologists running new patient and follow-up clinics, the radiologists in addition reading all the breast screening mammograms for the Avon area and running assessment clinics for this.

There are 5 Clinical Nurse Specialists (CNS) within the Bristol Breast Care Centre who perform much of the nurse led work.

History of the Breast Care Centre

The Bristol Breast Care Centre, the first of its kind in the South West, opened in 1995 as a self-contained, dedicated unit where patients are seen by various specialists who are experts in diverse aspects of the management of breast disease.

There were originally two breast units in Bristol, one at Frenchay and the other at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. The two units merged into the old Southmead Hospital in 2013 making it one of the biggest breast departments in the country. In July 2014 they moved into a new unit, purpose built in Beaufort House on the Southmead Site. Beaufort House is the oldest building at Southmead, originally the workhouse, but it has been transformed into a state of the art breast unit, whilst keeping a lot of the old features. In August 2014 they were joined by Avon Breast Screening so that now all breast services in Bristol are under one roof. This is something which not many cities in the UK can boast, and it has allowed much better working practices and improved patient pathways.

It was one of the first centres in the country to launch one-stop clinics, has twice been awarded the prestigious Charter Mark as a centre of excellence and received a Gold Star on the Peer Review.