Plans to increase staff working in endoscopy
More than £5.6 million will be spent over five years to increase the number of staff working in endoscopy at Shropshire’s two main hospitals.
The demand for endoscopy has been increasing year on year and it is expected that by 2019/20 there will need to be sufficient capacity at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust to deliver 26,537 endoscopic procedures per year, 4,875 more than in 2016/17.
Endoscopy is a procedure that allows a doctor to view the inside of a person's body.
Endoscopy plays a vital role in the diagnosis of, and on-going surveillance for gastrointestinal cancers, including bowel and oesophageal cancer.
It is also performed for the diagnosis, surveillance and treatment of a wide range of conditions and diseases that are not cancer-related.
Simon Wright, chief executive of SATH, said the demand for endoscopy has been increasing at pace both locally and nationally for some time.
The trust hopes to employ about 27 additional staff over five years to cope with the demand.
He said: "What we have seen over recent years is that the age for screening for a number of different cancers has been extended to older and younger people.
"Because as we know if you catch cancer early there is a very high chance you will make a full recovery. So we are screening more and more people meaning our endoscopy is busier than ever.
"To avoid any problems we have anticipated the increase in demand and we are going to be employing more people using our facilities for longer hours, seven days a week so we can continue to give access to patients in the six week time frame that is set for us nationally.
"We don’t want people to have to go out of county for these tests we want to invest in more staff to come into our endoscopy units to meet the demand and we are one of the few hospitals that continue to see our patients within the six week threshold for diagnostics.
"This is the sort of thing that avoids the kind of problems we are sadly seeing because of what we inherited in some of our services like neurology and A&E and this prevents us from getting into that pickle in the future.
"So this is about our leadership board taking decisive decisions to prevent future problems.
"Because we have got in early what we have got is a really robust service where our staffing levels are good, we have got a good rota, we have great facilities and a beautiful place to live.
"We think we have a great offer and are confident we will be able to recruit into this.
"One of the things we are recognising is our patient’s lead busy lives and we want to extend our offer and make it more convenient for patients."
