Next Steps

Members of the Joint Committee of Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin CCGs on 29 January 2019 took a unanimous vote which will see Royal Shrewsbury Hospital become an Emergency Care site and Princess Royal Hospital a Planned Care site. Both hospitals will have a 24 hour urgent care centre.

This landmark decision will result in better care for patients, secure the £312m on offer from HM Treasury and develop both hospital sites to deliver state of the art facilities in which staff will be proud to work and patients will choose to be treated.

The decision by the Joint Committee of Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) on 29 January follows many years of planning and a formal public consultation, which brought about an unprecedented response rate from more than 3% of local people served by the hospitals. It will now allow plans to move forward to implement the model of better care for the future that have been developed by members of the public and over 300 clinicians, GPs and social care professionals.

Members of the Joint Committee of Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin CCGs have unanimously approved Option 1 (the CCGs’ preferred option). This means that the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford will become a dedicated Planned Care site and the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital in Shrewsbury will become a specialist Emergency Care site. This will allow specialist doctors to treat the most serious cases on the Emergency Care site, which is proven to be safer, provide better results for patients and reduce the amount of time people have to stay in hospital.

By having a separate Planned Care site, patients will wait less time for their appointments and beds would be protected for planned operations, meaning that is highly unlikely operations will be cancelled due to emergency admissions. In addition, patients will be able to access 24 hour urgent care services at both hospitals. This means that almost 80% of patients will continue to go to the same hospital as they do now for emergency and urgent care.

Now that the decision has been made, it will take several years for the programme to be completed. A significant amount of work will need to be done to implement the huge improvements that patients will experience.

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