Watchdog says hospitals may be in breach of licence

MONITOR, the health service watchdog which regulates NHS Foundation Trusts, says there are grounds to suspect the trust which runs Warrington and Halton General hospitals is in breach of its licence.

This follows an investigation of the trust, which recorded a higher than expected deficit position in 2014-15.

Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust ended the year with a deficit of £5.9 million and publicly announced, in April, that it expects the deficit to rise to £15 million by March next year.

Today, the trust announced that, while being in breach of its licence does not affect the day-to-day running of the hospitals, it is taking action to improve its financial position following the investigation.
It says it has worked with Monitor to draw up and implement operational plans to improve its financial position to ensure it can seek to provide its services on a sustainable basis. This includes focusing on its Transformation and CIP programme to progress cost efficiency initiatives and investing in new technology.

The trust is investing in changing its computer patient administration system to the new Lorenzo system later this year which will allow more efficient working across wards and departments.

Monitor also examined the trust’s A&E performance but has closed that investigation without further formal regulatory action following the trust’s improvement in performance over recent months.

Trust chairman Steve McGuirk said: “The issues affecting finance in the NHS are not unique to us in Warrington and Halton. Just yesterday a report showed that over a quarter of the 151 Foundation Trusts in the country face a form of regulatory action from Monitor so the challenges are well known.

“However, it is our role to manage the situation locally and to ensure our finances are sustainable in the long term.

“Being in breach of our licence does not affect the day to day running of the organisation. Our primary focus remains the delivery of safe, high quality healthcare to the thousands of patients and their families who we care for every single day. It does however mean that we will be under much more scrutiny by Monitor to ensure that a number of actions are performed.

“One of these is to draw up a turnaround plan describing in detail how we will meet our cost improvement targets in full over the next two years and reduce the deficit from £15m this year to something lower over the coming years.

“Naturally, we are confident as a senior leadership team that we are doing everything necessary to control our performance – we are seeing sustainable improvements in areas like A&E performance.
However, like many NHS trusts, the current financial position continues to be very difficult and the years ahead continue to look very challenging.”

The trust will report to Monitor on its progress over the coming months.