Building A Caring Future

In a range of very serious emergencies it may be better for patients to bypass the nearest local hospitals and be taken by highly-trained paramedics straight to specialist centres with the equipment, knowledge and experience – gained through treating many similar patients needed to save lives. At the moment, a patient is likely to be transported rapidly to their local A&E department, arriving in just a few minutes, but that is not a guarantee that the department will have the skills and equipment necessary for that person and their problems.

As a publicly elected governor of the Trust, I have been watching the progress of the project for some time, and have given much time to understand it by challenging and talking to our consultants about these proposals.

This emergency care centre is a first for the NHS. I believe that it will bring better, world class emergency care to all of us in Northumberland and North Tyneside.

I can quite understand that residents in North Tyneside and Wansbeck are anxious, but the provision of non-emergency A&E for their district general hospitals WILL continue locally.

This will mean that for the majority of patients going to the existing A&E, services will be better as doctors are not called away to blue light cases.

This project will not only give us all state-of-the-art emergency care, but see a massive investment in our existing local hospitals from Berwick to Wansbeck, Rake Lane to Haltwhistle.

As a group of senior clinicians in Northumbria we have been discussing ways of delivering improved clinical services for our patients for a number of years.

We believe that Northumbria's proposed emergency care hospital will give patients better access to better staffed, better equipped, emergency services. By uniting specialist medical expertise, patients will see senior specialists much quicker than is possible with our current arrangements and the training and expertise available to our junior doctors will be improved.

The investment in the general hospitals will allow patients to be close to home during their stays and for us to improve access to a range of services. All in all we expect patients to have better access to improved care across the board.

Accident and Emergency has always provided two main types of care, 'A' and 'E'. The 'A' part is to people who walk in and generally do not need admission into hospital. A&E services will not be lost from North Tyneside and Wansbeck. We not only will continue to provide this part of the service locally to most of the 50,000 people who walk into North Tyneside and Wansbeck, but we will provide a higher quality, faster service in better surroundings. And, unlike many UK hospitals who care for these patients with nurse practitioners and junior doctors, we will specifically staff ours with senior, trained doctors.

The 'E' part of A&E is now very specialised. UK A&E departments still deliver, as they have for the past 40 years, this specialised care through newly qualified doctors. Our new Specialist Emergency Care Hospital will let us have specialist consultants involved in the early care of patients. This will mean high quality care at the forefront of the NHS. .

We, the doctors and nurses who currently care for both groups of patients, are behind the plans and have been fully involved in drawing them up. Our plea as clinicians over the past 10 years has been to move from bureaucratic targets to being allowed to deliver true quality care to the public. Our proposal allows us to do this.

These plans will provide patients with a specialist emergency centre and although some may have to travel further, I understand the need to consolidate and centralise specialist emergency services.

I know that the A&E department at Wansbeck will not close but it's simply that people requiring emergency treatment for serious and life threatening problems will be taken to the new centre at Cramlington. This is about people who are very seriously ill being treated in the right place which allows us to develop services at the existing A&E department for those with less serious conditions.

This is a great opportunity to develop services for elderly patients, and those with ongoing medical problems such as chest disease. These patients are already managed by teams in the community working with our hospital colleagues. Now we can develop and stream line the specialist assistance they will get from hospitals such as Wansbeck. It will be a much more comprehensive and flexible service.

Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has actively involved GPs in the thinking around these changes and GPs are doing a lot of work around the detail of how these services can be best shaped to help patients.