{"id":169748,"date":"2025-06-09T08:08:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T08:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/169748\/"},"modified":"2025-06-09T08:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T08:08:09","slug":"crucial-services-at-birmingham-hospitals-under-scrutiny-by-national-nhs-bosses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/169748\/","title":{"rendered":"Crucial services at Birmingham hospitals under scrutiny by national NHS bosses"},"content":{"rendered":"

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust said plans are in place to address issues(Image: PA Wire\/Press Association Images)<\/p>\n

Crucial services provided by Birmingham hospitals are under close scrutiny by national bosses to ensure they improve.<\/p>\n

University Hospitals Birmingham<\/a> (UHB) NHS<\/a> Foundation Trust’s board of directors was told NHS England has placed it in Tier 1 for elective care, cancer and diagnostics for quarter one of 2025\/26.<\/p>\n

This is the highest level of oversight and support and means they are amongst the trusts that are most challenged in these areas.<\/p>\n

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The board was also alerted to issues around urgent and emergency care and endoscopy performance during the meeting on Thursday (June 5).<\/p>\n

Bosses were told work is being carried out and plans put in place to address concerns with some areas already seeing improvements.<\/p>\n

A report said urgent and emergency care services have ‘steadily improved’ while recovering from winer pressures.<\/p>\n

Meeting the four-hour standard improved to 62.4 per cent in March compared with 61.7 per cent in February but remains below the 68.4 per cent monthly target.<\/p>\n

Overall, the average time spent in Emergency Departments decreased in March to 347 minutes from 367 in the previous month.<\/p>\n

Admitted patients spent on average 698 minutes receiving treatment compared with 758 in February.<\/p>\n

But the report added the number of 30-minute ambulance handover breaches increased to 4,788 in March compared with 4,491 in February.<\/p>\n

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The trust’s performance in hitting the ’62 day cancer target’ – which aims for patients to receive their first treatment in that time – was 53.4 per cent for February, below the 67 per cent trajectory.<\/p>\n

The report said plans are in place to address this while a UHB Cancer Board is beng set up to provide oversight and trust wide improvement.<\/p>\n

The board was also alerted to issues with endoscopy performance following a decision to stop insourcing and the resulting loss of capacity.<\/p>\n

Iain Pickles, Chief Operating Officer, said a medium term plan was in place for providing the capacity but this was reliant on successful recruitment for the specialist roles required.<\/p>\n

For elective care, which covers planned non-emergency services, there were 79 breaches of the 65 week target in March, with 42 of these in Opthamology.<\/p>\n

The report said work continues to address late starts\/early finishes, lost hours, booking efficiency, turnaround times and ‘did not attends’\/on the day cancellations.<\/p>\n

And for diagnostics, which includes services such as X-rays, CT scans and MRI, the trust’s combined performance for March was 64.28 per cent, falling from 67.87 per cent.<\/p>\n

The report said trajectories for 2025\/26 have been developed and submitted as part of the annual plan.<\/p>\n

Dr Peter Williams, Non-Executive Director, told the meeting: “It’s a clear concern for us. We need to understand if there are structural issues underpinning this.<\/p>\n

“We know there has been huge focus, we know there has been a lot of work in this area so the question will be why aren’t we seeing improvements that we’d expect from this input?”<\/p>\n

The report to the board did say the letter received from NHS England has noted progress made by the trust in terms of reducing long waits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust said plans are in place to address issues(Image: PA Wire\/Press Association Images)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7820],"tags":[855,748,393,4884,211,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-169748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-birmingham","8":"tag-birmingham","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-nhs","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114652388126868967","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}