We’re not facing a Royal Free cash crisis

Published: 11 February 2010

• WITH reference to your story (Hundreds face axe at Royal Free, February 4), I would like to correct some of the many errors of fact.

First, as the statement supplied to your reporter makes clear, we are not cutting 400 jobs. In fact 180 posts – not people – are currently at risk and we expect to redeploy the majority of the affected staff.

We are not facing a cash crisis. We are on track to achieve our targeted surplus for the year, which has been adjusted upward during the year.

The board has not agreed to any merger or “integration option” with The Whittington. We are in discussions with them, as we are with UCLH, about ways in which we can work more closely in the future but no decisions have been made.

Finally, no strategy has been agreed under which “all out-patient appointments will be provided elsewhere”. Under the Healthcare for London initiative, some routine out-patient care will be provided in clinics in the
community, closer to people’s homes, but for many services we will continue to provide such care.
David Sloman
Chief Executive
The Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust

Lacking…

• I THINK that if the Royal Free was properly managed it could cut exactly half of its staff without affecting the services it provides. 

My mother has been there several times recently and on every single occasion she’s been there twice as long as necessary. 

Why? All the staff were kind and caring but the support and management systems were sorely lacking. 

My mother needed an X-ray and no one knew whether she’d had it or not (so another day’s stay). 

She fell out of bed trying to crawl to the toilet (hurried staff had left the sides of the bed up and the call button down on the floor) so, another two nights’ stay while she got checked out by X-ray (one night would have sufficed, but the hurried X-ray department only did one of the two X-rays so, by the time this was discovered, it was another night’s stay to get to the front of the queue). 

Plus the mix-up when they came to get her for an endoscopy (“We told the ward last night that she should be nil-by-mouth.” “No you didn’t”) – another two nights’ stay. 

Plus the wait for three hours because they’d run out of blood-testing “pods” and didn’t have any spare staff to fetch them. 

Plus the thoughtlessness of posting on a public noticeboard a private memo about how seriously to treat people who complain, and – below the clock in A&E for ambulance admissions, you’ll find a cheering notice of how to contact the coroner! 

They say that once is an incident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern. 

So get in decent professional managers who can keep stays to a minimum.
Name and address supplied