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| Vital financial reform will
sharpen services |
New Royal Free chief executive Andrew Way argues
that the hospital’s financial troubles are confined to the
past
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Andrew Way
The Royal Free extension
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THE Royal Free Hospital and its sister hospitals provide some
of the best hospital health services in the country – indeed
many of the specialist services are of national and international
renown.
This is not only something the residents of Camden can be proud
of but also consider themselves fortunate to have locally.
Of course it is right and proper that local people should be concerned
that when their local services are tinkered with, they are not going
to lose out because of it. So what has been going on at the Royal
Free?
The Royal Free has been living beyond its means for some years now
and this has to stop.
The trust has managed to find one-off ways of financially supporting
clinical services, while those around us have found more efficient
ways of providing those same services.
Our local NHS needs the Royal Free and its sister hospitals to be
as efficient as they can be so that the available NHS funds support
as much healthcare, not just hospital care, as possible.
The changes that the clinical teams (yes, that means doctors, nurses
and managers) are leading are changes that much of England, most
of northern Europe and nearly all of North America have been making
over the past five years or more – so they are not new, just
new to us.
What is of concern to the trust board and to me is the pace of change
required because of our poor past financial performance.
Some of these changes I would like to take at a more considered
speed, involving patients more in the way they will take place,
engaging more staff in their development and delivery, but this
is not to be if the trust is to meet its legal requirement to balance
its budgets this year.
To start the ball rolling we have made an investment in investigative
services such as X-ray. This will increase the X-ray consultants
from 10 to 12 and help to reduce the number of patients waiting
for discharge simply because their X-ray results are not ready.
And it will mean we will be able to see more people who require
these tests as out-patients. We are also looking closely at our
pharmacy arrangements to ensure these too assist the prompt, safe
discharge of patients who are fit to go home or on to other services.
We will invest in patient hotel accommodation, something that many
other specialist hospitals have been offering for a long time for
their patients who live far away.
We have been praised by the Department of Health for our success
in reducing MRSA and continue to seek ways to keep that and other
healthcare acquired infections to a minimum.
It is also true that less time spent in hospital means that our
patients will have less chance of being exposed to infections of
all kinds. No patient who has come into hospital while sick wants
to stay once well again, especially if there’s the risk of
catching something from another patient.
It is inevitable that times of change bring uncertainty. I have
assured all permanent staff at the Royal Free that there will be
no redundancies.
We are reducing the number of temporary staff employed by the trust
but only where doing so will not undermine patient care. I will
continue to hold briefings with patient groups and staff to ensure
that people are well informed about what we are doing and why and
I will try to ensure that the local population we serve knows of
the changes we are making through regular briefings with the local
media.
So what does all this mean? We will continue to offer all our current
services to patients, provided our primary care trust commissioners
(the organisations who fund us on your behalf) continue to want
us to provide those services.
The costs of providing care will fall because it will be more efficiently
organised. We will keep our services under review to ensure that
patients are still receiving the standard of care that we would
want for our families, friends and ourselves.
We will use our improved financial stability to improve patients’
experiences with new ward accommodation, new imaging (X-ray) facilities
and better administrative systems, all underpinned by new information
technology.
In other words, although these changes have been forced on us they
bring with them the prospect of a bright future for the Royal Free
as it once again becomes a financially sound organisation. |
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