Shropshire Star

Future Fit: Covid outbreak puts plans under pressure as business case not expected until next year

The coronavirus outbreak has piled pressure on the plans to take the Future Fit hospital reshuffle to the next stage, it has emerged.

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Royal Shrewsbury Hospital

An outline business case for the scheme, which would separate emergency and planned care at the county's two major hospitals, is now not expected to be developed until next year.

Bosses at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust say a number of those working on the scheme had to be redeployed to help in the fight against the pandemic.

They have since returned to continue their work and are aiming to develop an outline business case in the first half of 2021.

The trust, which runs Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, says the longer-term impact on its plans will be assessed in the future.

Chris Preston, director of strategy and planning at SaTH, said: “Over the last few months, the NHS has been responding to an unprecedented challenge stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, which continues to have a substantial and far reaching impact on the delivery of clinical services and staffing across the country.

"This has resulted in some significant changes to the day-to-day running of our hospitals and the way we provide our services.

“A number of the hospitals transformation programme team members are clinical, so at the height of the pandemic they were redeployed to support the trust’s response.

"Staff have now returned to the programme and are continuing to progress through the business planning stage, with the aim of developing an outline business case in the first half of 2021.

Responsibility

"As we learn more about the impact of the pandemic, we will be assessing the longer-term impacts on our plans.”

It comes as Shrewsbury MP Daniel Kawczynski has written to Boris Johnson asking him to resume work with the Health Secretary to ensure that Future Fit is brought to fruition.

The project, which was previously in the hands of the Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Groups, was signed off by a joint committee in January last year, following a public consultation in 2018.

It has since been tweaked by Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who ruled the county's main emergency centre would be based in Shrewsbury as planned, but Telford is to have an 'A&E Local' instead of an urgent care centre.

PRH will also take over responsibility for planned care but is due to lose its consultant-led women and children's services.

A document leaked to the Shropshire Star last year showed the cost of delivering the original hospital shake-up scheme had soared by almost 60 per cent to £498 million – £186m more than first anticipated.

It has led to questions about how the scheme will be delivered, with some calling for it to be taken back to the drawing board altogether.