STRUCTURE: Health organisations in Shropshire are assessing the feasibility of a single emergency centre to serve the entire county.
The centralisation of emergency services at Shrewsbury & Telford Hospital Trust is being considered under the ‘Future Fit’ programme, which is aimed at reshaping acute and community hospital services in Shropshire to make them sustainable for the next twenty years.
There are currently two emergency departments in the county at Shrewsbury and Telford’s two main sites, Princess Royal Hospital and the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.
Under the Future Fit plans these services would be consolidated into a single emergency department which would serve as a trauma centre for the whole of Shropshire.
This would be supported by an unspecified number of “urgent care centres” strategically placed across Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin to provide low and medium acuity urgent care 16 hours a day.
Following sign off of this clinical model in June, Future Fit is now testing the feasibility of potential locations for the emergency centre. The three locations being examined are Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, Princess Royal Hospital, and an as yet to be defined new site on the A5 corridor between Shrewsbury and Telford.
In addition to centralising emergency care, the programme also plans to create a single diagnostic and treatment centre which would perform 80 per cent of planned care in the county.
The organisations behind Future Fit believe the greater “critical mass” offered by this single centre will “improve quality and outcomes, help to conserve specialist services within the area and offer the potential to repatriate services currently located ‘out of county’”.
While the diagnostic and treatment centre will be “operationally separate” from the emergency centre, the two could be co-located.
A long list of options for the configuration of services is expected in September.
Source
Source date
July 2014
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