Merger With Partnership is Option of Choice

Changes are coming in light of the current governments NHS White Paper, Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS.

Option of choice agreed

The Joint Leagues of Friends’ share mutual aims of not only raising funds to augment the care and comfort of patients primarily within the community hospitals, but also the wider community setting.

Since the days of the peoples marches to keep the community hospitals open when they were under threat; the excellent staff within these vital establishments have changed how they work, adapted to become more efficient, expanded the services that they can offer to make them appropriate to the individual communities they serve; but still retained that important non-quantifiable element of care and compassion that is so vital to a patients recovery.

Wigton Hospital League of Friends, as part of The Joint Leagues of Friends, was aware that NHS Cumbria PCT faced a crucial decision on the best way to separate the commissioner and provider functions of our community services.

The Joint League of Friends aims to ensure the protection and growth of the community hospitals, and foster and support their metamorphosis into hubs of local community services.

There were 3 options put forward to enable the split between commissioner and provider functions of the community services, these were:
     1. The creation of a Community Foundation Trust may have been the most appropriate route, but the impossibly short timescale imposed by the Government ruled this out immediately.
     2. Social Enterprise model had some features of note; however there were genuine concerns about the terms and conditions of service for existing and new staff.
     3. A merger with an existing NHS provider of which there were three contenders:
           • Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
           • University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust
           • North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust

The merger with Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has been selected as the option of choice, they already have a similar operations network, being community based, so were more closely allied to the “Closer to Home “ principals which will continue to be the driving force for the community staff.

As a group, the Joint League of Friends, and individually Wigton Hospital League of Friends, supports this decision, on the proviso that the new organisation continues to support the community hospitals of Cumbria; allowing the hospitals to continue to develop.

We wish the staff well with this new venture, they can be sure that the League of Friends will continue to support them and provide a voice for them at board level.

Links to article in News & Star - http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/talks-to-be-held-about-end-of-cumbria-s-primary-care-trust-1.756935?referrerPath=2.880/home

Wigton Hospital League of Friends is Registered Charity No. 1035890 
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