Hospitals get ultimatum to improve – or face takeover Health watchdog warns trust after series of patient deaths
AHOSPITAL trust has been told to make significant improvements or risk being taken over after a warning notice by the health watchdog.
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust confirmed it had received the letter from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) this week.
Staff at the trust, which has been in special measures since 2015, were emailed about the notice on Tuesday.
The notice details improvements the trust must make by March, or further sanctions could be considered by the CQC – including the appointment of a special administrator to take over running the trust’s three hospitals at Worcester, Kidderminster and Redditch.
The notice came after two patients died on trolleys in the Worcestershire Royal Hospital’s accident and emergency department at Worcester in the same week, earlier in January.
In one of the cases, a female patient on an emergency trolley in a corridor within A&E suffered an aneurysm and died later in a resuscitation bay.
Another patient died after suffering a cardiac arrest on another A&E trolley within the department after waiting 35 hours for a ward bed elsewhere in the hospital.
Health campaigners who had battled for 11 years against a downgrade of Redditch’s Alexandra Hospital admitted defeat in January.
The hospital’s in-patient paediat- ric ward was shut last year, which campaigners claimed was effectively a downgrade of accident and emergency, and neo-natal services were taken away in 2015.
The trust was placed in special measures in December 2015 by the CQC, which raised safety concerns over A&E, paediatrics, maternity and gynaecology departments.
Last year, the CQC told the trust to take action after inspectors found that more than 10,000 patients’ X-ray scans had not been assessed, raising fears serious health conditions had been missed.
A major consultation to shake up healthcare at the trust’s hospitals and across the county is under way.
Worcestershire’s three clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) launched the consultation in January which, if the option proposed was picked, would move many planned operations to the Alexandra, but concentrate most emergency care at the main Worcester hospital.
More day-case and short-stay surgery would go to the county’s smaller Kidderminster Hospital.
The proposals put forward by the CCGs have been backed by the trust and the West Midlands Clinical Senate.
A spokesman for the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust said: “We can confirm we received the Section 29A letter on January 27 from the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Staff emails were sent out this afternoon at 2.30pm.
“We have arranged a series of staff meetings for later this week.”