Shropshire Star comment: Miracle if doctors and nurses are recruited
The clock is ticking, and we don’t mean in terms of what you probably first thought of.
The decision by Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust’s board temporarily to close the accident and emergency unit of the Princess Royal Hospital overnight has caused concern both as a standalone decision and because it raises the suspicion this is the recommended Future Fit solution arriving early through the back door.
As the closure is not due to take effect until November, there is still time to put right those factors which have led to the prospective shutdown at the Telford hospital.
All the trust needs to keep both Shropshire’s A&E units open is an extra seven middle grade doctors, and 15 more A&E nurses. And also a magician to conjure them up.
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Don’t hold your breath. If the PRH has failed to attract staff over the past days, weeks, months, and years – and it is skilled staffing shortages, leading to a potentially unsafe environment for patients, which has been given as the reason for the temporary closure – then it will be a minor miracle if it manages to recruit enough within the next four weeks or so to keep its A&E open.
Putting numbers to the problem does nothing to solve it. It just underlines the scale of what has to be achieved.
On the assumption that skilled staff are not about to suddenly throw themselves at the PRH’s door, a better chance of staving off this overnight closure is through an imposed solution. Campaigners are calling on the Government to step in with a “rescue plan,” and for an intervention by the Health Secretary. One idea is to find doctors who could work through holidays, or come out of retirement.
However, with the backdrop being that the PRH is failing to attract enough skilled staff, we have to ask why that is so. And if it is because, for whatever reason, they don’t want to work at Telford, how is that going to be overcome? Incentives? Compulsion? Blind optimism?
Outside intervention, if it came, would be a terrible Shropshire failure, and that would be the case even if that outside intervention was a “success.”
Instead of a decision affecting Shropshire being made by Salopians.
