A FORMER consultant physician at a hospital serving Bromsgrove has said the long-delayed project reorganising hospital care in Worcestershire is “a cancer eating into the morale of hard working staff.”

In an email sent to colleagues dated Monday, August 24, Dr Santi Vathenen from Redditch’s Alexandra Hospital, who resigned from his post in June and left this week, said he felt the long-running project had failed.

In the 2,211-word email to colleagues, which was released publicly with his consent by pressure group Save the Alex, Dr Vathenen described the need to divert patients who would otherwise have gone to Redditch to Worcestershire Royal Hospital was “a ‘cancer’ eating into the morale of hard working staff”.

“It is clear that that the path taken by the strategic services review with its overall objective of achieving centralisation of acute services on one site has failed,” he said. “There is clearly inadequate capacity at Worcestershire Royal Hospital to provide acute services for the current catchment areas of the three hospital sites in Worcestershire and this is a situation that will remain for the foreseeable future.

“Whatever option is chosen it will only be successful if both the acute sites, Alexandra and WRH, are able to provide a safe service and this means that both have to be attractive to work in by having the ability to retain, recruit and train staff.”

Describing the Alex as “the jewel in the crown of Worcestershire health care”, Dr Vathenen – who worked at the hospital for 22 years and occupied a number of senior roles during this time – said he believed the best alternative would be to instead run both sites as fully-functioning, independent acute hospitals.

“Running acute services fully supported on both sites will not be more expensive,” he said.

“On the contrary it will make both sites attractive to work in and actually save a considerable amount of money, not least by improving recruitment of consultants, nurses and junior medical staff and reducing the currently heavy reliance on expensive locum staff, and by reducing travel time etc.”

He added this would help alleviate the serious financial problems faced by Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust – which runs the two sites as well as Kidderminster Hospital – as it would mean more income-generating elective operations could be carried out in-house instead of outsourcing them to private providers.

An acute trust spokesman said Dr Vathenen had been vocal about changes to hospital services in Worcestershire and was entitled to his opinion, but denied they were shared by the majority of consultants, GPs and other clinicians.

“All NHS partners in the county believe this model is the best way to provide clinically safe and sustainable services going forward,” he said. “The model has been devised and endorsed by the clinicians who will be responsible for delivering it for many years to come.

“They believe it is the right model for Worcestershire and we will ask the public for their views when the model is put out to public consultation.”