THE hospitals review has included looking at care in four core areas: Elderly Care, Women and Children’s Care, Planned Care and Emergency Care.

Each area has been scrutinised by four working groups made up of healthcare staff and clinicians, who have now presented an executive summary of their findings to date.

Elderly Care

The elderly population in Worcestershire is growing by three per cent above the national average, said Dr Anthony Kelly, GP and Worcestershire Clinical Senate’s chairman.

“There is an increasing demand on services, because of the increasing complexity of their health needs.

“We need to change how we deliver care to the elderly.

“Hospital care is not necessarily the best place for elderly people to stay for any length of time.

“Stays in hospital must be for the short term, with a view they stay close to home where necessary with rehabilitation close to where they live.

“This needs to be developed on an integrated basis joining up different health care services, county council and social services.

“That has to start right away.”

Women’s and Children’s Care

“There is evidence the earlier in your care you get consultant input the better,” said Dr Andrew Short, consultant paediatrician for the acute hospitals trust. [Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust] However, he said there were simply not enough qualified and experienced consultant paediatricians “out there” to fill the demand, and it was “unaffordable” even if there were the numbers.

“One solution was to concentrate specialist services on one site,” he said.

“Where you have complex gynaecological and neonatal needs we can concentrate, and that’s what we want to see – a centre of excellence in this type of care in Worcestershire.

Planned Care (Inpatient operations etc)

“We have a responsibility to plan strategically as senior managers and directors to provide the highest quality of services and keep up with modern treatments, so we we followed a similar process looking at planned care,” said Dr Nick Purser, consultant breast surgeon at the hospitals trust.

“The direction of travel is a concentration of experts in one place for a particular type of activity and recognising that brings added benefits in terms of them keeping up with modern treatments.

“We don’t want them to miss out and we also recognise we need to make the most of funding to provide effective services.”

Emergency Care

“We were charged with developing a system providing the greatest quality of care for most people and that care needed to be delivered by the senior doctors and nurses for a majority of the 24-hour day period,” said Dr James France, accident and emergency consultant at the hospitals trust.

“We had a group made up of hospital staff, and community physicians and nursing teams as well, and it’s clear the challenges lie both inside the hospitals, and outside – in terms of GP attendence, out of hours and the like.

“It’s been useful seeing primary and secondary care healthcare staff working together.”