Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) is the UK’s fourth largest acute teaching trust. It was established on 1 April 2006 following the merger of Nottingham City Hospital and the Queen's Medical Centre. They provide acute and specialist services to 2.5 million people within Nottingham and surrounding communities from the Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC) and the City Hospital campuses. In 2009/10 they have an annual budget in excess of £687m of public sector funding and employ approximately 12,000 staff. The Trust has over 1,500 volunteers.

The Trust is the principal provider of acute general, specialist and tertiary hospital care to the population of Nottingham, receiving 98 per cent of all elective and urgent referrals from primary care trusts in Nottinghamshire. They currently have approximately 1,663 hospital beds. Activities include general hospital services for the local population and a wide range of specialist services for regional and national patients. They provide a range of general acute and specialist services across nine clinical directorates. These are:

• Acute Medicine • Cancer and Associated Specialties • Diabetic, Renal & Cardiovascular • Diagnostic & Clinical Support • Digestive Diseases and Thoracic • Family Health • Head and Neck • Musculoskeletal and Neurosciences • Specialist Support

The Trust has a close partnership with The University of Nottingham across a vast range of research activities. This includes the three Biomedical Research Units (BRUs) in gastroenterology, hearing and respiratory medicine. Nottingham was the only city in the country to achieve three successful BRUs. The aim is to bring tangible benefits to patient care through evidenced-based changes in clinical practice.

Nottingham University Hospitals is one of only two national pilots for a trust-wide programme called ‘Releasing Time to Care – the Productive Ward’. The aim of this is to increase patient and staff satisfaction by releasing nurse time from unnecessary or ‘wasteful’ activity.

The City Hospital campus is the older of the two campuses, founded in 1903. It occupies a large 90-acre (360,000 m2) site on the ring road to the north of the city centre. It provides general medical and surgical services to the local population, and is the location for many specialties such as cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery, breast surgery, plastic surgery, nephrology, oncology, urology, and infectious diseases.

QMC campus was the first purpose built teaching hospital in the UK, and also contains The University of Nottingham Medical and Nursing Schools and Nottinghamshire Healthcare mental health wards. During the year 2008/09 a proportion of outpatient and day case patient care was transferred to the NHS Treatment Centre operated by Nations Healthcare. NUH staff have been seconded to provide a service to the organisation, but it operates independently of the Trust.

The two hospitals are connected by a link bus which provides a free service for patients and staff.

In 2013 Circle won a dermatology contract from the Nottinghamshire Clinical Commissioning Groups for services across the Trust and their Nottingham NHS Treatment Centre. Nottingham was previously regarded as a national centre of excellence for dermatology. In December 2014 it was announced that six of the eight consultants had left rather than transfer to Circle. It was suggested that the doctors were concerned over job stability at a private employer, and had fears that a profit-driven provider would not offer opportunities for academic research or training. The trust announced that it would stop providing acute dermatology services to new patients from February 2014. The President of the British Association of Dermatologists said this was "just one example of the many fires we are fighting across the UK to try to keep dermatology services open in the face of poorly thought-out commissioning decisions and the Government’s lack of understanding of the implications of pushing NHS services into unsustainable models provided by commercially driven private providers or enterprises,” ^[1]

Funded research

Bliss, the special care baby charity are currently funding research into the benefits to premature and sick babies of manuka honey dressings.

See also

• List of NHS trusts

External links

• Trust website

References