EXCLUSIVE
By Rick Lyon, Co-Editor
The region’s hospitals trust is now officially one of the worst performing in the country, despite spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to bring in an ‘improvement team’.
Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (HUTH), which manages Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital, is ranked 130 out of 134 trusts in the country by NHS England.
NHS England – the executive body responsible for leading and overseeing the NHS – ranks health trusts against a range of performance criteria, including patient safety, access to services and finances.
Along with the lowly Acute Trust League Table ranking, HUTH is currently rated as ‘Requires Improvement’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) – the independent regulator of health and social care in England.
It is ranked 116 out of 119 comparable trusts for cancer treatment waiting times on the NHS England Data Dashboard, when measured against the national 62-day target.
HUTH is also performing worse than the national average for every other measure on the dashboard, including A&E waiting times.
The trust is part of the wider NHS Humber Health Partnership (HHP) group, which includes Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (NLaG). The group serves a population of 1,500,000, employs 19,000 staff and has a budget of £1.6bn, according to its website.
HHP is failing and requires urgent improvement, according to another NHS classification.
The Acute Trust League Table forms part of NHS England’s Oversight Framework, which it describes as “a consistent and transparent approach to assessing NHS trusts, ensuring public accountability for performance”.
Under the framework, trusts are graded from a ‘segment rating’ of 1, which is judged to be “high performance”, to 5, which is classed as “significant concerns”.