Single hospital ‘smart’ solution

‘It is the market stalls that create the atmosphere and the buzz there and without them it is just an average high street like you see up and down the country’

Everyone will be pleased to hear that our east Kent hospitals are no longer considered ‘inadequate’ by the Care Quality Commission [Gazette, May 13].

Clearly staff have worked hard to achieve that improvement, on top of the extra work imposed by the pandemic, and we congratulate them. However, there are weaknesses exposed by the inspection, which have nothing to do with our dedicated NHS staff, but are caused by the hospital system in east Kent. The report says that the trust does not have enough nursing staff with the right qualifications, skills, training and experience. In the case of

the QEQM it does not have the right number of consultants in each department of the hospital, which stops it hitting the fourhour targets.

This situation has gone on for years. It has proved impossible to recruit enough staff to cover three acute hospitals in east Kent.

That is why it is imperative for the government to invest in one main specialist acute hospital for the area, that can be a centre of excellence, and attract sufficient highly skilled clinicians, and nurses.

The vision for an extended area like east Kent has got to be a single hospital service, with its specialisms concentrated at the geographical centre of the area, but with open doors for local people wherever you are. This must be a ‘smart’ hospital, so that the parts of the hospital at the edges, in Ashford and Thanet, have the best diagnostic equipment, linked to the acute centre at Canterbury, so that people living there have rapid and accurate referral to specialist treatment if they need it.

At the same time all three hospital buildings would provide for local people the 87% of the services for which people go to hospital at present.

Let’s hope that our MP and our council will do their best to persuade the government to make this long-overdue investment in our future. Martin Vye Patrixbourne Road, Bridge