Morecambe Bay hospital chiefs rapped by governor (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Morecambe Bay hospital chiefs rapped by governor

7:10pm Wednesday 2nd November 2011 in Health By Allan Tunningley

MORECAMBE Bay hospital bosses have been criticised by one of their trust’s governors following a series of damning reports.

John Kaye told a governors’ board meeting that the cat-alogue of concerns raised serious questions about the way the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Trust was being run.

His criticism follows official censure over deaths at Furness Genrral Hospital’s maternity unit, an outpatients re-appointments debacle and claims that the trust is suffering higher than average mortality rates.

“We are in a very bad place right now and it has not just happened out of the blue,” said Mr Kaye. “People have been making mistakes at various levels. The governors have to take very seriously how the board of directors has been running the trust.”

He said governors were becoming ‘more and more aware of the tensions’, and added: “We don’t want to be involved in management but we must be able to assess management if we are going to do our job properly.”

Other governors at the quarterly meeting in Lanc-aster Town Hall also exp-ressed concerns, with one particularly bemoaning ‘the lack of medical talent’ on the the trust’s board of directors.

UHMBT chief executive Tony Halsall admitted it had been a difficult time for the trust, which runs Westmor-land General Hospital, Royal Lancaster Infirmary and Fur-ness General Hospital.

“The pace of the last few weeks had been horrendous,” he admitted.

The trust’s problems began with critical reports about the Furness General Hospital maternity unit, which had exper-ienced a series of baby deaths. The Care Quality Com-mission issued a November 21 deadline for improve-ments to be implemented.

Then further inv-estigations into the trust uncovered evidence that thousands of outpatients — including cancer sufferers — could have had treatment delayed because of re-app-ointment delays.

The third blow to UHMBT occurred when it was revealed that the trust potentially had the highest mortality rate in England.

However, Mr Halsall insisted the board was doing every-thing it could to solve the problems.