A&E plan for infirmary
HEALTH CHIEFS SAY THERE WILL BE A FULL-TIME DEPARTMENT IN THE FUTURE
HEALTH chiefs have indicated that Huddersfield Royal Infirmary will have a full A&E department in the future.
They were responding to calls for clarity from campaigners who have queried the suitability of the proposed A&E at the infirmary and whether it will have the necessary clinical codependencies to make it a full A&E, known as a “Type 1”.
Calderdale and Huddersfeld NHS Foundation Trust (CHFT) was awarded £196m in April 2019 to alter the HRI and Calderdale Royal Hospital. However the vast amount of money is set to be spent in Halifax with around £30m allocated to the combined new plans and revamp in Huddersfield.
Pressed by campaigners and councillors for more detail on their plans for the HRI site, A&E consultant Mark Davies, the hospitals’ clinical lead for Emergency Medicine, said the future category of A&E at Huddersfield had not yet been formally defined.
He said: “In terms of the categories that are used, Level 1 is described as a consultant-led emergency department, which will cater for patients with all presentations. I’d imagine it would be that one [at HRI], but that would be for NHS England to define rather than us.”
He said plans for HRI included “the emergency management of all patients who arrive” and emergency physicians on site 24 hours a day as well as senior anaesthetics provision.
He added: “What we will not have is the ability to deal with every patient who arrives all of the time, just as we don’t have that ability at Huddersfield or at Halifax now, which is why we have specialist services at Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield that we and the rest of West Yorkshire use on a regular basis.”
Campaigners with Hands Off HRI and Calderdale and Kirklees 999 Call for the NHS continue to have concerns about the capacity of the split site as well as transport issues that could disadvantage the elderly and the vulnerable.
They queried the effectiveness of a traffic survey carried out during the pandemic last November when fewer people were on the roads and said the trust’s plans were “not based on good evidence”.
They argued that a total figure for car parking at both hospitals had not been made available and that a shuttle bus would not be made available for patients and visitors.
Councillors on the Calderdale and Kirklees Joint Health Scrutiny Committee (Mar 19) expressed disappointment over “a lack of measurable data”, concern over “sketchy” detail and that there was no outline business case.
Stuart Sugarman, managing director of Calderdale and Huddersfield Solutions Ltd, has been appointed “travel champion” and is liaising with West Yorkshire Combined Authority on bus links between the two hospitals.