Hundreds of beds set to go as care shifts to community

Across the region, a series of reviews are being carried out which could lead to much-cherished hospital services being axed and instead provided in the community or further afield, with the loss of hundreds of beds.

The most urgent action is required in North Yorkshire where NHS services, which have been beset by succession of financial crises for a decade, must save £230m from 2011-15.

A report last year found too many patients were needlessly referred for hospital care, that there needed to be better prevention of ill-health particularly among the elderly and a different role for the county’s 10 community hospitals, which in future are expected to have fewer than the existing 200 beds and be developed as centres for diagnostic and out-of-hours care as well as rehabilitative care.

But it warned that if community services failed to meet the challenge in the largely rural county, patients would continue to look towards hospitals, putting unsustainable pressure on budgets and services.

Regional health chiefs are now putting increasing pressure on NHS managers and senior GPs to come up with solutions and deliver early savings. Key areas being examined include changes to urgent care services, improved treatment for those with long-term conditions and measures to control demand for hospital care.

In separate moves, urgent plans are also being drawn up by clinicians in the Wakefield, Pontefract and Dewsbury areas which will see a major reconfiguration of hospital services to deal with the Mid Yorkshire trust’s spiralling financial problems.

Extra capacity will be created in GP and community care services, as officials set out to make ambitious reductions in A&E admissions of eight per cent and cut hospital admissions among people with long-term conditions by five per cent.

In East Yorkshire, a clinically-led service review is under way to deliver efficiencies worth £200m prioritising patients with long-term illnesses, dementia, end-of-life care and urgent care.

Major changes to NHS services in the Doncaster area are already being implemented.

Seriously-ill patients are no longer being admitted Mexborough’s Montagu Hospital and are instead transferred to neighbouring units with better facilities in Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham. A specialist rehabilitation unit will instead be set up at the hospital which will also carry out more day surgery.

The development is being matched by an expansion of community services and the corresponding closure of three rehabilitation wards at Tickhill Road Hospital in Balby.