The Hull University Teaching Hospitals (HUTH) NHS Trust has been placed at the bottom of a newly-released national league table. The Trust is ranked in last place of NHS England’s 134 acute trusts.
The Trust, which runs both Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital, has said the ranking “reflects the scale of challenges which the organisation has been managing for some time.” A spokesperson for the Trust added that these issues “are not new.”
League tables for NHS trusts have been introduced by the government in a bid to raise standards across the country and tackle a ‘postcode lottery’. The rankings are now done quarterly.
The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, previously said: “These league tables will identify where urgent support is needed and allow high-performing areas to share best practices with others, taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS. Patients know when local services aren’t up to scratch and they want to see an end to the postcode lottery, that’s what this government is doing.”
The Trust’s spokesperson also said: “Since the summer, we have taken a deliberate decision to surface those challenges openly through the development of our clinically-led Improvement Plan. That plan, shaped by frontline clinicians and teams, sets out clear actions to strengthen patient safety, stabilise services and improve reliability of care.
“Many changes are already under way including a major improvement programme to reduce waiting times for breast cancer treatment to the introduction of a seven-day service to help patients with clots on their brains. We’re also changing ways of working – adapting medical rotas to provide 24/7 cover, introducing a new digital appointment system empowering patients to book and cancel appointments and offering people new services to support their recovery at home instead of them spending too long in hospital.
“The additional oversight and enforcement undertakings that are linked to our position provide a structured framework to support delivery of that work, including strengthening leadership, governance and organisational arrangements across the partnership.”
By: Andrew Spence, LDRS
