Health campaigners 'cautiously positive' over new alliance between Shropshire and Birmingham hospitals
Health campaigners have cautiously welcomed the new alliance between Shropshire's major hospitals and a leading NHS trust in a bid to improve struggling services in the county.
Shropshire Defend Our NHS says it could be good news for The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) but has warned there are 'no quick fixes' and getting the right funding will be key.
It was announced last week that University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) will step in to provide support to improve services at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Princess Royal Hospital in Telford.
The trust's chair Ben Reid has also stepped down.
It came after Amanda Pritchard, chief operating officer of NHS England and NHS Improvement, confirmed that an "improvement team of unprecedented scale" had gone into the trust tasked with turning it around.
Shropshire Defend Our NHS, which campaigns to defend the NHS against cuts and privatisation, said it could be good news for the county's hospitals but there were "no guarantees".
A statement from the group said: "There will be an ‘improvement alliance’ with University Hospitals Birmingham – a trust that looks to be well-run and to have good services. It’s about leadership.
"The plan is that the trouble shooters from Birmingham will try and sort out SaTH’s problems with things like managing ‘risk’ to patients, and learning how to do things better after clinical mistakes are made.
"This stuff is so important in building safe care."
But the group said it was remaining "cautiously positive" as there were some real possibilities for good change, but things could also turn sour.
The group's statement continues: "SaTH has been in a state for years, and is in real crisis now. There are no quick fixes here.
"It's going to take a couple of years of careful work to turn things round.
"Money is key. NHS Improvement has brought in a ‘financial improvement director’.
"That’s grand if they also bring in enough money to provide decent patient care.
"Without that, it’ll be about making cuts more efficiently. Our hospitals make a loss on almost all the services they provide – just because national NHS funding doesn’t work properly for small hospitals.
"The solution is to sort the funding problems, but that’s a political decision. Sorting this out is as important as it gets.
"And the final worry is closely tied in with funding. Our hospitals serve a population scattered across over 2,000 square miles. The area’s largely rural. In Telford, the biggest urban centre, poverty is a real problem.
"There’s very limited public transport across our patch, and when it does exist, it’s expensive. We need healthcare we can get to.
"Travelling for super-duper specialist care is fine, but it’s essential that most healthcare is where people can actually get to it."
SaTH is in special measures after a highly critical CQC report and has been the subject of a number of warnings after follow-up inspections.
It is also the focus of an inquiry into failures in maternity care which is now dealing with more than 1,800 cases, and has led to the police investigating to see if criminal action should be taken.
