By Lauren Monaghan, Junior Local Democracy Reporter
The chief executive of Nottingham’s hospitals says the conclusions of a critical national NHS review have already started to be implemented locally.
Anthony May, Chief Executive of Nottingham University Hospitals Trust (NUH), gave his response to the Darzi review after the trust’s board meeting today (September 12).
The Darzi review was conducted by peer and surgeon Lord Darzi.
It started shortly after the general election and looked into the performance and funding of the NHS as whole.
Some findings from his report found “ballooning” waiting times and delays in A&E and cancer care, crumbling hospitals and poor patient flow.
The review was requested by the Labour government and will be used to help with the government’s 10-year NHS plan.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said today it means big changes are needed to fix the NHS, such as more hospital care moving to community care, the NHS moving from analogue to digital data, and a focus on preventing sickness as opposed to focusing on treating it.
Mr May told the Local Democracy Reporting Service today many of Darzi’s findings were already recognised and anticipated by the trust, which has a strategy already in place.
He said: “At NUH, which already has its really good forward plan, called ‘People First Strategy’, we anticipated a lot of this and we’re working really hard to implement ‘People First’, which is reshaping NUH end-to-end.”
The strategy was first published in 2023 following engagement with staff, patients, volunteers and partners.
The programme aims to improve the barriers at NUH related to patient flow, recruitment and retention of staff and culture and leadership within the trust.
Mr May added some of the other changes the Health Secretary wants to see in the NHS have already begun at NUH.
He said: “It is important that we move our services to analogue and digital, we are doing some of that already in our outpatient services, with our electronic patient records, but we would always want to do more.
“Moving people from acute settings to community settings, People First at NUH is already trying to do that… We’ve got a great relationship with our primary care colleagues, we’re working on a list of priorities of what they think would help speed up referrals, get people out of hospitals quicker, we work with the Integrated Care Board on ‘flow’.
“A lot of what we are seeing in the news today is already happening at NUH.”
Mr May has said the trust has also made improvements to their discharge rates.
He said: “We regularly have days when we’re busy where we discharge 400 patients a day- given that we’ve got around 1600 beds, you can see what a massive effort it is to do that.”
Patient care at NUH has already taken a community-based approach, where maternity, FGM and diabetes clinics have already been moved out of hospitals.
The trust is also making use of ‘virtual wards’, where patient vitals are monitored from home, only to access a hospital when in an emergency.
Next year, a new community diagnostic centre will also open next to Broadmarsh in Nottingham.
Mr Streeting has also said a new hospitals building programme is now on hold pending a review, which includes the planned mass rebuild of the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham.
Tomorrow’s NUH (TNUH) refers to the programme to redevelop both the Queen’s Medical Centre and the City Hospital.
Mr May said: “We already knew that we were being deferred for a number of years to make way for the hospitals that have got problems with concrete, we were already planning for a delay.
“What we’ve been asked to do by NHS England is to keep going with our planning, including public consultation, so we haven’t stopped the programme and we and our partners are still working up the plans.”
New wards and units have recently been opened at the trust, including a dementia-friendly ward and a foetal medicine unit.
Mr May added: “[We’re] particularly working to leverage the potential value from the new combined authority, devolution deal, so for us it’s business as usual.
“It’s not like we have stopped developing the hospital, we haven’t stopped the planning for Tomorrows NUH.”
Mr May added anything incorporated into the government’s 10-year NHS plan will also be incorporated into NUH.
