Top consultant likens NHS crisis to the Titanic

A SENIOR consultant at the Alexandra Hospital has likened the financial crisis facing the county's health economy to the Titanic heading towards the iceberg.

Nick Purser, clinical director of surgery at the Woodrow Drive Hospital, said while there was nothing wrong with the way services were run now, the planned changes were about ensuring the people of Worcestershire would have access to the best quality healthcare in future years.

"This is about 2020 and what do we want it to be by then and by that time we want all of the care delivered to people in A&E in emergency medicine to be delivered by consultants or trainee doctors directly supervised by consultants so the quality goes up, the treatments are better, more efficient, more effective and the lengths of stay are lower and the taxpayer also benefits from greater efficiency," he said.

"If you are the captain of the Titanic and you had a map with a huge iceberg on it, which is what the financial projections are they are a map showing in the future if we don’t change course we are going to hit the iceberg, wouldn’t you want to look at the options you had got so you could move into a different direction, avoid the iceberg and still keep the ship intact? That’s the situation we are in. We are looking forward thinking we need to make changes and are putting everything on the table."

Mr Purser moved to reassure residents the process was not biased in favour of moving services to Worcestershire Royal Hospital but was being clinically led based on what would deliver the best outcomes for patients.

"The driver going forward, the emphasis, is on quality being more important than the hospital building," he said.

"Yes it’s going to mean changes and some pain for practically everyone in the county but we want to persuade people the benefit they will get will outweigh that.

"We know what money we have got in Worcestershire and we have to adjust and make adaptations to that so we don’t end up with old fashioned services all spread out because we did not have the courage to put them in one place or two places and that would mean we would be unfairly discriminated in Worcestershire because why should people at the QE have all the best treatments?"

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