The Trust is building a small new hospital in Berwick, its most northerly outpost, following the very unpopular decision to temporarily close Berwick Maternity Unit The trust opened the first hospital in England purpose-built for emergency care at Cramlington in June 2015. The Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital cost £75 million. It has emergency care consultants on duty at all times, and a range of specialists available seven days a week. The A&E units at Hexham, Wansbeck and North Tyneside hospitals have been downgraded, and in December 2016 the opening times were reduced to 16 hours a day, in order to release staff for Cramlington where there are many more patients arriving at night. In 2012 the trust established a subsidiary company, Northumbria Healthcare Facilities Management Ltd, to which 806 estates and facilities staff were transferred. The intention was to achieve VAT benefits, as well as pay bill savings, by recruiting new staff on less expensive non-NHS contracts. VAT benefits arise because NHS trusts can only claim VAT back on a small subset of goods and services they buy. The Value Added Tax Act 1994 provides a mechanism through which NHS trusts can qualify for refunds on contracted out services. The trust set up a wholly owned subsidiary Northumbria Primary Care Ltd, in April 2015. It is run by local GPs and provides practice management including quality monitoring, governance and compliance, payroll, financial services, HR and estates maintenance for practices, initially Ponteland Medical Group with 11,000 patients, and Collingwood Medical Group in Blyth which serves 5,000 patients. In October 2016 it had five general practices with a list of 37,000, and claimed that the GPs were meeting patient demand more effectively. Nurse practitioners, clinical pharmacists, prescribing physiotherapists and specialist women’s health doctors had been introduced into the practices. In June 2019 the trust announced that it would be sending to between 120 and 150 patients a year to the Rutherford Cancer Centre for chemotherapy.
Performance
In December 2013 the Trust was one of thirteen hospital trusts named by Dr Foster Intelligence as having higher than expected mortality indicator scores for the period April 2012 to March 2013 in their Hospital Guide 2013. The Trust was the first to buy out a PFI contract, borrowing £114.2 million from Northumberland County Council in June 2014 in a deal which reduced its costs by £3.5 million per year. It was named by the Health Service Journal as the best acute trust to work for in 2015. At that time it had 7217 full-time equivalent staff and a sickness absence rate of 4.29%. 81% of staff recommend it as a place for treatment and 72% recommended it as a place to work. In March 2016 it was ranked first in the Learning from Mistakes League. In May 2016 the Trust received an ‘outstanding’ rating from the Care Quality Commission.
