Future Fit: ‘Enough is enough’, says Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will tell NHS England “enough is enough”, and that a swift decision is needed on the controversial Future Fit hospital shake-up, say two county MPs.
Mr Hunt also reiterated that there was no guarantee of funding being available for the £300 million reorganisation, according to Mark Pritchard and Lucy Allan.
Once a decision is made the scheme will be judged against other competing proposals from across the country.
Mr Pritchard and Ms Allan met with Mr Hunt this week in an attempt to break the long-running deadlock over the future of the county’s two main hospitals.
They were joined by Telford & Wrekin councillors Andrew Eade and Nigel Dugmore to voice concerns about the length of time it was taking to reach a decision.
They said Mr Hunt agreed to tell NHS England that enough was enough and it was time to make a decision.
Mr Hunt told them that once a decision had been made the matter could then be referred up to him if he needed to intervene.
NHS England said yesterday it was reviewing the proposals backed by the county’s two clinical commissioning groups before the plans are put out for public consultation.
The preferred option, agreed by the Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin clinical commissioning groups, is for a single A & E unit at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, while planned services will be centred at Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital. The consultant-led women and children unit will move to Shrewsbury under the plans, although Telford would retain a midwife-led unit.
But the MPs said they were told that the cost of the proposed reorganisation was “significant”, and that the funding might not be available given other competing demands.
Mr Pritchard said: “The trust has to get on and make a decision in the interests of patient safety and patient outcomes. The Health Secretary has agreed to speak to NHS England to get them to sort it out.”
Ms Allan added: “This has gone on long enough. People deserve to know what is happening to the future of health care in Telford. It would be wholly unacceptable to be putting residents through this uncertainty, consulting on a proposal for which funding had not been agreed and which might in any event never happen.”
The two commissioning groups this week signed off Future Fit’s “pre-consultation business case” and consultation documents, which the public will be invited to comment on.
NHS England has now been asked to validate the documents, a process expected to take about two weeks, before the public is invited to have its say from early December.
