Future Fit: Shropshire A&E should be at Shrewsbury, health bosses recommend
Shropshire's A&E services should be based at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, with the emergency department at Telford's Princess Royal Hospital being downgraded, health bosses recommended this afternoon.
Emergency services and services provided by the Women and Children's Centre should be moved to Shrewsbury's hospital, they said.
At a meeting of the Future Fit Programme Board held at Shrewsbury Town Football Club's Greenhous Meadow, members announced their preferred option for the future of hospital services in Shropshire, which will now go out to public consulation.
They have voted that the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital should have the county's only A&E department and will take on Women and Children's Services that are currently provided in a £28 million, two-year-old centre at the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, which officially opened in September 2014.
Shrewsbury will have an emergency and critical care centre, which will care for people who suffer with strokes or who are injured in car accidents, and an urgent care centre.
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Telford will still have an urgent care centre, which will still provide about 80 per cent of the services that a normal A&E department would offer, as well as planned surgery and the majority of day surgery.
No formal decisions will be made until Summer 2017, once a formal public consultation has been held and its results analysed.
David Evans, joint senior responsible officer for NHS Future Fit, said: "I need to stress that this is not a final decision.
"We are recommending to the two CCGs that, in the board's opinion, we are ready to begin a public consultation on the future of hospital services.
"We have reached this preferred option, based on the clinical and non-clinical evidence we have had before us.
"We have been working towards this recommendation for the past three years and I would like to thank everyone involved.
"We know there is still further detailed work to be done before our CCGs can reach a final decision next year.
"It is still very much the feeling of the NHS Future Fit Programme Board that our clinical model, based on a new Diagnostic and Treatment Centre, a single emergency centre and two new urgent care centres treating the majority of people who currently present at A&E is the way to deliver safe, high quality and sustainable hospital services for the patients of Shropshire, Telford & Wrejin and Mid Wales.
"We are confident the process we have followed in our decision making to-date has been robust, and we have sought external guidance to assure us."
The recommendation will now go before a joint committee of Telford and Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Groups and, if agreed, will go forward for a 12- week public consultation, starting in January.
