Patients and staff made to pay the price of mismanagement

I RECENTLY visited Dewsbury hospital as an outpatient and received excellent service. On examining my appointment notes I saw this slogan, “Bringing Together Community and Hospital Services”. This I find rather confusing. With essential services moving to Pinderfields, this should read, “Separating Community and Hospital Services”.

I have some sympathy with the Mid Yorkshire Trust, because of the Blair-Brown administrations dictating that private finance must be used to fund hospital-building.

This removed the responsibility for paying for the building work from central government, which resulted in a large financial burden being placed on Mid Yorkshire and boards all over the country.

When the idea was conceived to build a new hospital at Pinderfields, detailed plans for a building to contain all departments must have been drawn up. Costs for rent, maintenance, cleaning, catering, staff wages, the latest equipment and so forth must have been calculated. This is known as a budget.

These will then have been shown to the Department of Health, to be agreed and signed off. The finance to come from the Ministry should then have matched the expenditure figure.

The huge deficit building up tells me that things have gone drastically wrong. This, I venture, is gross mismanagement.

When the board took over Dewsbury Hospital, it was in the black, very soon it was over £10m in the red. The board are now taking the results of this mismanagement out on hospital staff, by asking them to take a 10 per cent pay cut, and the people in the Dewsbury and Pontefract areas who are seeing services removed.

I think it is time for the board of the Trust to step down.

The Department of Health has a statutory requirement to provide full hospital services in the local area. They should sort out the financial situation and bring full services back to Dewsbury and Pontefract. This I feel is sure to make tens of thousands of people very happy.

The refusal of the board to review the situation in light of 
a recent report about care of elderly patients on Ward 2, stating that there were procedures in place do deal with it, was very arrogant.

Why did the said procedures not work? A team should have gone in straight away to sort staffing levels, training and so on. Patient care should always come first.