Hospitals set for £20m boost in shake-up to attract top talent

The move to transform the hospital sites in Scarborough and Bridlington is seen as crucial to attracting a new generation of talented consultants and nursing staff under a major restructuring of the NHS.

A long-awaited merger of the NHS trusts covering the Scarborough and Bridlington locations with the organisation responsible for York Hospital is expected to go ahead on April 1.

And the Yorkshire Post has learnt that a £21m debt which has loomed over the Yorkshire coast trust for more than a decade is expected to be wiped out under the shake-up which will affect services for about 500,000 people.

The need to overhaul healthcare has been prompted by the changing demographics, with increasing life expectancy placing community services under intense pressure. Details of the £20m investment have yet to be finalised, but the improvements are expected to be introduced over four years.

A series of public meetings are planned this month to showcase the plans after long-running talks have hammered out the strategy for the proposed merger.

Members of the Scarborough and Whitby branch of the North Yorkshire Local Involvement Network (LINk), which is funded by the Department of Health to represent the public, had previously voiced concerns that healthcare could be undermined in the overhaul. But the branch’s chairman, Leo McGrory, claimed he is “far more optimistic” than he was six months ago over the proposed shake-up. He stressed the creation of an over-arching trust covering Scarborough, Bridlington and York will help attract high-calibre replacements for consultants who had retired from their posts.

Mr McGrory, who will chair the first meeting in Scarborough tomorrow, said: “The NHS has changed beyond all recognition since its inception, people are living longer and treatment and surgery have improved beyond recognition. But this presents major challenges as community healthcare is coming under more and more pressure. The status quo cannot simply be maintained, and the NHS has to change.”

The merger has been proposed as there is little prospect of the Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust achieving elite foundation status. The Government has unveiled a radical shake-up of the NHS that will mean all trusts have to achieve the enhanced status by 2013.

But doubts have surfaced about the Scarborough trust’s ability to secure clinically and financially sustainable services, and talks are under way for a formal merger.

The chief executive of the Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust, Mike Proctor, will attend the public meetings. He took on the role in March last year after the trust endured a prolonged period of uncertainty, with six chief executives in the space of only nine years. Mr McGrory welcomed the “openness and transparency” which Mr Proctor has brought to the proposed merger, and claimed too many NHS deals had been done “behind closed doors” in the past.

A Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust spokeswoman said: “The vision for the new organisation is to be recognised locally and nationally as delivering outstanding clinical services that meet the needs of its varied population and support services that matter to patients. It will provide certainty and sustainability where this has previously not been the case.”

The first meeting will be tomorrow at Scarborough’s central library, before another session at Bridlington Spa on Monday next week. A third public meeting will be at Whitby Coliseum on Tuesday next week, before a fourth event at Malton Rugby Club on January 30. All meetings will start at 6.30pm.

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