CRITICAL nursing care in North Yorkshire has taken a leap forward with the opening a £1m intensive care unit.

Cricketing legend and local resident Ian Botham performed the honours at the Friarage Hospital, in Northallerton.

For him, as well as the staff, it was a very special occasion, as he had a personal reason to be grateful for the nursing care it offers. "Our eldest daughter Becky was too frequent a visitor to the old intensive care unit as she was seriously ill on a couple of occasions," he said.

"What they have got here now is a lot more spacious, and I think they will enjoy working in it - as much as you can in those conditions, which can be quite traumatic."

The unit is in the hospital's Millennium Building, which was built with funds donated by the League of Friends.

It takes the number of intensive care beds up to six, from two.

It has been equipped and staffed with money allocated through a successful bid to the Critical Care Modernisation Fund, following last year's national review of all critical care services.

The medical director and senior consultant anaesthetist, Dr Michael Walton, described the opening of the unit as an exciting development for critical care at the Friarage.

"It is a combination of intensive care and high dependency care for those patients who are seriously ill or who have had major surgery," he said.

"The new unit will continue to provide excellent critical care, but with much enhanced facilities for the local population. It will also be an important resource when the Friarage links with the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough next April."

In the past two or three years the ITU at the Friarage, like others across the country, has had difficulty meeting demand, but it is hoped the new facilities should make that a thing of the past