Councillor criticises health chiefs over report

OFFICIALS from Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have faced criticism from councillors in Northumberland.

Managing director Rob Harrison and director of patient and staff experience Annie Laverty attended the meeting of Northumberland County Council’s Health and Wellbeing scrutiny committee.

Alongside director of communications Caroline Docking, they presented the latest set of quality accounts for the trust in the wake of a damning CQC inspection published in January.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) downgraded the trust, which runs the Freeman Hospital and Royal Victoria Infirmary, to ‘requires improvement.’ This followed inspections throughout 2023, which found there had been a “significant deterioration” in the trust’s leadership and some staff felt there was a culture of bullying.

A number of measures were introduced to improve performance, including the highest level of support for cancer care to help the trust hit waiting list targets.

The draft quality accounts show 85.9% of patients waited 31 days between a decision to treat cancer and the start of treatment, while the target is 96%. Just 55.5% of patients waited 62 days or less from an urgent suspected cancer referral to first treatment for cancer, against a target of 85%.

The report stated “underlying issues” had prevented the trust from hitting targets, including limited theatre capacity with “additional provision not keeping pace with increases in demand”.

Coun Georgina Hill was critical of the trust. She said: “It’s concerning, as you’ve mentioned – and I don’t think you can overstate how concerning it is – that in the backdrop of the Post Office scandal and the treatment of whistleblowers, the NHS is one of the few organisations that is worse than local Government in terms of the treatment of people who complain.”