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| Eye boutiques point to future
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Moorfields find innovative way
raise funds
WORLD famous Moorfields Eye Hospital at Old Street is opening
up a chain of eye surgery “boutiques” in various hospitals
around the capital.
Capitalising on its reputation for high-class ophthalmology, it
is to open branded clinics in 10 other general hospitals including,
so far, St George’s, Tooting, Homerton Hospital, in Hackney
and North Middlesex in Edmonton.
It is all part of an experiment, being closely watched by other
foundation hospitals, including Great Ormond Street and University
College hospitals, to attract more business.
The Moorfields scheme developed from outreach work that started
before it gained foundation status last year.
The hospital’s chief executive Ian Balmer said: “We saw
that patients were having to travel long distances to us. It was
sensible to set up services closer to where they live.”
The units are branded with the Moorfields name, and when patients
cross their threshold they are effectively entering Moorfields’
space.
Mr Balmer said half the trust’s new patients will be treated
exclusively in the outlying boutiques.
“Only those needing the most expensive items of ophthalmic
equipment are referred to headquarters,” he added.
Foundation status has enabled Moorfields to borrow more than £5m
a year to fund these developments – about five times the amount
available when it was under central NHS control.
Sue Slipman, director of the NHS Foundation Trust Network, said
it was like ushering in a “Debenham’s model of healthcare”
across the health service, where a collection of branded boutiques
provide shoppers with convenient access to a full range of popular
labels. That, she said, is what NHS general hospitals may look like
soon.
If a hospital gets a bad reputation for a particular branch of surgery,
poor infection control or too many cancelled appointments, it is
likely to lose patients and may have to close wards or even entire
departments, she said.
The answer, Ms Slipman argued, is for these hospitals to offer medical
brands that the patient can trust. For instance, parents might be
more inclined to have a child treated at their closest hospital
if its paediatric services were run by the world-renowned Great
Ormond Street trust.
Ms Slipman said she was convinced the Moorfields experiment was
the shape of things to come.
“When other hospitals realise they have to start making a living
outside the protection of the NHS brokerage system, these changes
will happen.”
Other foundation trusts were likely to launch similar chains of
boutiques once the government clarified the rules for setting up
joint ventures.
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