St Helier manager tells us "patients deserve better"

After recent media coverage we wrote to James Blythe, Managing Director at St Helier Hospital. He told us that patients deserve a better hospital environment, and that while they do everything they can to ensure patients get safe and effective care, this relies on workarounds which aren't sustainable.

Here we publish our letter to St Helier Hospital management, and their reply.

We want to hear from local people about their experiences at St Helier, so as to help make the case for redevelopment to begin as soon as possible. Tell us about your experiences on our Have Your Say page. We're also putting together plans for other ways we can find out about local people's views about St Helier – more details soon.

Dear James

The following articles have been shared with me and Dave Curtis, the manager of Healthwatch Merton. These highlight issues concerning the condition of buildings on the St Helier site.

While we have not received any direct concerns from local residents who have used the services at the hospital, we are seeking assurance that these issues are not having an impact on patient safety and also that the Trust has a plan to address them.

We would be grateful, if you could respond to both of these points so that we can share this, should be approached about these media articles.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Many thanks,

Pete Flavell

Chief Executive Officer

Healthwatch Sutton

Dear Pete

Thank you for your note about our Building Your Future Hospitals programme following the ITV News coverage and the piece in the Wandsworth Times.

Firstly, I really appreciate you contacting me and I would like to assure you that we are doing everything we can to ensure our patients receive safe and effective care, despite the significant challenges with our hospital estate. I’m glad to hear that concerns have not been raised with you, but I do appreciate that our patients deserve a better environment to receive care, and this is why we are committed to delivering our Building Your Future Hospitals programme. It will ultimately improve the quality of care we provide, reduce length of stay, and improve outcomes for our local communities.

At times, parts of our estate reach the end of their usable life and cannot be safely maintained. We have taken a range of measures to address these issues. At St Helier this has included the development of a new ITU area to maintain care for the sickest patients and refurbishment of the 6^th floor of the main block to house our renal and oncology patients, and our estates and clinical teams continue to adapt and work around some of the severe and intractable challenges we face. The ITV coverage highlighted the case of Beacon Ward, which had to be put out of use for inpatient care early in 2022. This only serves to highlight the scale of the challenge our teams face.

This work is informed by regular condition surveys, a programme of planned preventative maintenance which is independently reviewed by our authorised engineers, and a robust risk escalation and management framework. These in turn form the basis of our five year plan to mitigate our most significant estates maintenance risks, and the nationally mandated Premises Assurance Framework.

We know our patients deserve a better environment to receive care, and these workarounds and adaptations are not sustainable in the long term. This is why we continue to work closely with the national New Hospital Programme on our plans for the specialist emergency care hospital and improvements to Epsom and St Helier hospitals. We have made a strong case to the New Hospital Programme for more upfront investment so we can submit planning applications and start building works more quickly, and hope to have an announcement on funding and the national programme timetable soon.

I would be happy to meet with you to discuss this further if helpful, and please do contact our Communications team at esth.communications@nhs.net for more information to support your response should you be contacted by the media about these or any other issues to do with the Trust.

Thanks

James Blythe

Managing Director

Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust

Share your thoughts