Secrecy surrounding Midland hospital failures
Mar 30 2009 by Alison Dayani, Birmingham Post
Two damning reports on hospitals in the Midlands have cast light on fundamental flaws with Foundation hospitals. Health Correspondent Alison Dayani looks at the drawbacks of the coveted independent status and considers if it is time for the Government to readdress rules that govern these NHS trusts.
Despite vast differences between shocking failings at Stafford Hospital and Birmingham Children’s, Healthcare Commission inspectors hit upon a common problem with Foundation Trusts – secrecy.
Levels of public scrutiny had been allowed to diminish because, like most Foundation hospitals, trust board meetings were being held behind closed doors and it was harder for watchdogs, journalists and the public to access what exactly was taking place.
These reports have now prompted MPs to start analysing whether more needs to be done to ensure the accountability of Foundation hospitals, which are still funded mainly by the NHS but run independently and allowed to decide their own targets and sign contracts with private companies for services.
Rob Marris, Labour MP for Wolverhampton South West, has already urged ministers to stop the creation of more Foundation hospitals after it emerged that Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust’s focus on reaching financial targets to gain Foundation status played a part in failures that led to patient deaths.
Private board meetings after becoming a Foundation Trust also meant financial tactics were never truly openly available to patients and relatives before the Healthcare Commission report.
While in Birmingham, the city’s health scrutiny committee has raised concerns with Birmingham Children’s Hospital’s new chief executive Sarah Jane Marsh that closed board meetings meant complaints from visiting surgeons at Edgbaston’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital that staff could not recognise surgical equipment and severe bed shortages causing 70 young patients to be turned away every month went unreported to the public for nearly a year.
The committee chaired by Coun Deirdre Alden now plans to write to Monitor, which oversees Foundation trusts, expressing concerns that most meetings are being held behind closed doors, to the detriment of free reporting for the media and the public.
Questions are also being asked over the level of public involvement within Foundation trusts, which were heralded as being the first time “patients would have a way to direct and shape these organisations and really influence how they are run” when launched five years ago.
University Hospital Birmingham Foundation Trust, in charge of Selly Oak and Queen Elizabeth hospitals, was the first in the Midlands and one of the first in the UK to gain Foundation status in 2004.
It was celebrated as a momentous occasion that would allow the Trust to be accountable to local people who had been elected as governors or signed up to be members, of which there were 51,000 public members and 22,000 patient members.
Coun James Hutchings became a UHB governor, excited at having more say on his two local hospitals. Looking back, the Tory Birmingham City Councillor for Edgbaston said his governor role has not been as influential and as powerful a position as he had expected.
He described how the board of governors was only informed of executives’ decisions, but could not influence any plans for the hospitals or overturn what had been decided. One such case arose when UHB governors found out the new super-hospital was being built without a kitchen, but had no chance to change these proposals.
“Power of the governors is limited,” said Coun Hutchings. “We can sack the chairman, who can appoint the board, but that is it.
“There is a question mark in my mind that if things have gone badly, whether we
