US hospital to advise London doctors

TWO east London hospitals are to be mentored by the “world’s safest hospital” as they try to improve care and come out of special measures.

Doctors and nurses at Queen’s hospital in Romford and King George hospital in Ilford will be taught by medics from the Virginia Mason Institute under a five-year, £12.5 million partnership with the NHS.

The scheme was unveiled today by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt as part of his initiative to reduce the 800 “avoidable” deaths each month in NHS hospitals. The drive has set him on a collision course with doctors’ union the British Medical Association as he vowed to force consultants to work at weekends.

Mr Hunt said: “The achievements at Virginia Mason over the past decade are truly inspirational.”

The institute, based in Seattle, will share systems that include increasing bedside nursing care and an “electronic dashboard” to improve monitoring of intensive care patients.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge trust, which runs the two hospitals, is one of five NHS trusts to benefit from the institute’s guidance.

Two weeks ago the Care Quality Commission upgraded the trust’s status from “inadequate” to “requires improvement”. Last year it breached the NHS four-hour A&E waiting time target for the 50th month. Massively in debt, its agency bill for stand-in staff topped £100,000 a week.

However, it has hit the A&E target in five weeks over the past four months and has cleared a backlog of serious incidents awaiting investigation. Chief executive Matthew Hopkins said of the US partnership: “This is a real investment in us as an organisation and the population that we serve.”

Today the BMA said Mr Hunt’s threat to enforce seven-day contracts was a “blatant attempt” to distract from the Government’s “refusal to invest properly in emergency care”. Mr Hunt has given the BMA six weeks to negotiate changes to contracts, with arrangements in place by 2020.