Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust runs the Alexandra Hospital, Redditch, Kidderminster Hospital & Treatment Centre, and Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester.

Services in Kidderminster and Redditch have been under threat for many years. Proposals to downgrade Kidderminster hospital provoked the establishment of Independent Community and Health Concern. Their candidate Dr Richard Taylor defeated David Lock the sitting Labour MP in the 2001 General Election. The building of the new Treatment Centre, in Kidderminster was handled by Durrow healthcare consultancy.^[1]

In November 2013 further proposals to reduce services in Redditch were opposed by Redditch, Bromsgrove and Stratford councils who claimed "The removal of services from Redditch will leave what is already a vulnerable society, with the worst accessibility to health services in the region, and will introduce substantial inequalities with the populations of Redditch, Bromsgrove, Studley, Alcester and neighbouring areas being significantly worse off than all other areas in Worcestershire."^[2]

In December 2013 the Trust had to cancel non-urgent operations and appointments due to increased pressure on their A&E units.^[3]

In April 2014 it was revealed that the Trust had mislaid up to 270,000 ultrasound scans which were stored on obsolete technology dating back to 2004. Andrew Brown, whose complaints led to this revelation had been labelled a ‘vexatious complainant’ after raising concerns about his treatment at Worcestershire Royal Hospital over several years.^[4]

The Trust's Chief Operating Officer, Stewart Messer, attempted to ban Stuart Gardner, a UNISON representative of the West Midlands Ambulance Service from Trust premises in January 2015 after he told the BBC about 18 patients being treated in corridors at the Worcester Royal Hospital. Messer claimed the staff were upset.^[5] The Trust later agreed with the union they did not have the authority to ban the paramedic from its premises and an apology was issued for suggesting he should be.^[6]

The Trust opened a new cancer treatment unit which has three linear accelerators in January 2015, a partnership with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, which it hopes will treat about 1,500 patients per year who previously had to travel for radiotherapy. It is also intended to extend the chemotherapy services available on the site.^[7]

Nurses at the Alexandra Hospital have complained of serious bullying by their seniors.^[8]

In February 2015 it was reported that four emergency consultants had resigned from the Woodrow Drive hospital and another emergency consultant had resigned from the Worcestershire Royal Hospital. Consequently the future of the Alexandra Hospital Accident and Emergency department is in doubt.^[9] Their resignation letter accuses “successive management decisions” of undermining services at the Alexandra, which they say has “led to the self-fulfilling prophecy of failing and unsustainable services” and that the proposed service model would be “neither an A&E service nor a safe service”.^[10]

In April 2015, after a major incident at Worcestershire Royal Hospital when seven patients had to be cared for in a corridor Neal Stote, chairman of the Save the Alex campaign claimed that reconfiguration plans meant that "Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust is trying to make us go to a hospital which is not only hard to get to but a hospital which, when you get there, is unable to cope."^[11]

See also

• Healthcare in Worcestershire
• List of hospitals in England
• List of NHS trusts

References