Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust is an NHS trust which runs King George Hospital in Goodmayes and Queen's Hospital in Romford. It also operates clinics at a number of sites in the nearby area including Barking Hospital and Brentwood Community Hospital.
History
The trust was established as Barking, Havering and Redbridge Hospitals NHS Trust on 5 June 2000 and became operational on 1 April 2001. It took its current name on 1 February 2009.
Facilities
It has a new Hyper Acute Stroke Unit, a regional centre for neurosurgery, one of the busiest cancer centres in London and one of the busiest maternity services delivering over 8,000 babies a year. The Trust has a strong infection control record, and slashed the number of MRSA and Clostridium difficile rates by more than 70% in recent years.
It had an oncology unit, run in partnership with Hospital Corporation of America, with 14 inpatient beds, six chemotherapy chairs and two consulting rooms established in 2011. The partnership was dissolved in March 2018.
It is implementing System C's Medway patient administration system.
Performance
In October 2013 it was placed in the highest risk category by the Care Quality Commission. In December 2013 it was reported that the trust had paid out more than £23 million for negligence claims in maternity in five years. The CQC report said that while the trust was working hard to make improvements in many areas, it still provided "unsafe care" in A&E and "needs to urgently focus" on resolving these issues because "The A&E departments are at times unsafe because of the lack of full-time consultants and middle-grade doctors." It was placed in special measures on 18 December 2013.
In December 2013 it was placed in special measures by the Care Quality Commission. Inspectors returned to the Trust in March 2015 and highlighted improvement in some areas. The Trust remained in special measures with ongoing challenges around governance and performance. The Trust was re-inspected in October 2016 and came out of special measures in March 2017 - the first Trust in London to do so.
In March 2014 The Trust was forecasting a deficit of £38 million for 2013-4 and a similar figure for 2014-5. In September 2014 the trust revealed a huge, previously unreported waiting list of more than 90,000 patients, 61,143 of which had been waiting past the national 18 week limit. In February 2016 1,015 patients had been waiting more than a year for elective treatment - more than those waiting in the rest of England.
The trust was one of 26 responsible for half of the national growth in patients waiting more than four hours in accident and emergency over the 2014/5 winter. Its performance against the 4-hour standard improved dramatically during 2015-16. While the Trust had been among the worst performers in the country at one point, it became one of the best in London. It hosted a conference in 2015, giving other struggling trusts an insight into the work which had taken place to turn performance around. However, the improvement was short-lived. It spent 10.6% of its total turnover on agency staff in 2014/5. In December 2019 it was the third worst performing trust in England, with only 44.6% seen within 4 hours.
The Trust was one of five to benefit from a five-year, £12.5m programme announced by Jeremy Hunt in July 2015 to bring in Virginia Mason Medical Center to assist English hospitals using their clinical engagement and culture tools including the Patient Safety Alert System and electronic dashboard. Hunt said: “The achievements at Virginia Mason over the past decade are truly inspirational and I’m delighted they will now help NHS staff to learn the lessons that made their hospital one of the safest in the world – patients will see real benefits as a result.”
In June 2015 Leigh Day & Co co-ordinated group litigation involving 17 separate families based on the trust’s alleged “failure to take reasonable care to ensure that there was a safe system of healthcare provided at [Queen’s Hospital]”. This included failure to provide sufficient numbers of suitably trained nursing staff and failure to supervise those staff and to ensure adequate records.
In October 2017 it needed a £15 million emergency loan from the Department of Health when external suppliers began threatening legal action over unpaid bills. In 2016-17 it reported that only 25% of non-NHS invoices were paid within 3 months, compared to 59% the previous year. The target is 95%.