IS THE re-opening of Holsworthy Hospital’s inpatient beds on the cards?

It could be, following an announcement by the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust recently of the steps required to ‘safely reopen’ the inpatient bed facilities — the first step being the inauguration of a new group of stakeholders who will help investigate the hospital’s options.

However, mayor of Holsworthy, Jon Hutchings, has said he will remain cautious regarding the latest update.

In March 2017 the Trust took the decision to close the inpatient beds temporarily due to ‘significant safety concerns’ including low bed occupancy and staffing levels.

In a statement, the Trust said: “In order for the beds to reopen, the Trust needs to address both the staffing challenges and the low occupancy of the inpatient beds”, adding that the work to address the bed occupancy falls into two parts.

Firstly, the Trust and the CCG will need to undertake a series of audits and reviews to understand the reasons for the declining occupancy and whether anything could reverse this trend.

They said: “In order to do this, the Trust and the CCG are reviewing patient notes, admission data and data from domiciliary care and residential care homes for the six to nine months prior to the temporary closure of the beds, to understand why occupancy levels have declined.”

Secondly, the Trust has asked its partners and commissioners to investigate whether offering beds from Holsworthy to a wider catchment area would help tackle the bed occupancy issue — with the hope of filling the 16 inpatient beds.

The Trust said: “If the outcome of this work suggests that the inpatient beds could run at a safe capacity, then the Trust will look at the workforce required to safely deliver the service.”

They say they are ‘committed to keeping the community informed’ and are in the process of setting up a group of key stakeholders to oversee the process.

In response to the announcement by the Trust that work is being done to investigate whether the temporarily closed inpatient beds at Holsworthy Community Hospital could be re-opened, Cllr Hutchings said: “They have set up a stakeholders group but they have chosen who is part of it. My argument is, we have a group already set up who have shown a keen interest from the start in the re-opening of the hospital but they have not been invited to the meeting.”

Speaking about his concerns with the Trust’s approach, Cllr Hutchings said: “The Trust suggested they want a member from the community, someone from health watch, a patient etc, but when I made suggestions of people who would be suitable they basically seemed to turn them down and told me that I need to bring these suggestion up at the first meeting — I said no, it will be too late by then!”

He added: “Even our MP, Geoffrey Cox, has not been invited to sit on the stakeholders group because they know he will fight what they say. When I asked the Trust why he wasn’t invited as well they wouldn’t tell me.”

Cllr Hutchings voiced his concerns with their approach, adding: “I think the problem is we disagree with what they say and they don’t like that. The Trust want to be able to say what they are going to do and for the group to let them do it, but they know myself and other members of our pre-existing group will fight them to the end to save our hospital and that is why they won’t let them come along — I will invite the group anyway, what are they going to do, kick them out?”

The Trust has published the report presented to the CCG on its website. For more information visit www.northdevonhealth.nhs.uk/have-your-say/Holsworthyengagement