A DILAPIDATED NHS building will be demolished tomorrow, paving the way for an extra 27 county beds for mental health patients.

A £15 million inpatient centre, housing three 15-bed wards, will be constructed at Lincolnshire Partnership Foundation Trust's (LPFT) site in Long Leys Road, Lincoln.

Due to be completed in early 2012, the unit will offer patients – aged from 16 to 65 – state-of-the-art facilities where they can undergo rehabilitation prior to living independently or in sheltered accommodation.

Some of these patients will be referred on from the trust's Peter Hodgkinson Centre at Lincoln County Hospital, while others will be living with their condition in the community.

The project will be under way tomorrow, when the disused Yarborough Court building on site is due to be demolished to make way for the new inpatient unit.

Previously housing community mental health staff who now work from a centre in Carlton Boulevard, Yarborough Court was set to be demolished yesterday.

But the trust's contractor, Costain, needed to get the go-ahead from an asbestos inspector prior to beginning the work.

Construction manager Dave Evans, said: "We will run a machine into it and then it will take three or four days to clear and two weeks to scrap everything up."

Ann Dodd, who leads the project for LPFT, said the 45-bed inpatient unit would replace the trust's existing 18-bed facility on site, which comprises of Doddington and Saxon wards.

The facility, which the trust is confident will be granted full planning permission tonight by the City of Lincoln Council's planning committee, will house a women-only ward.

Mrs Dodd, a former psychiatric nurse, said: "Patients stay on the existing unit anywhere between six months and two years. Rehabilitation is not a quick-fix and it takes a long time to gets things right.

Ward manager of Doddington and Saxon wards Claire Ward said the new unit would see patients living in single en suite bedrooms situated within the ward.