Health regulators give crisis hit hospital red card in quarterly update

South Lakes MP Tim Farron has called for the Hospital Trust to act quickly on Friday's announcement of the quarterly report from health regulator Monitor that under their 'traffic light' system the hospital is deemed as Red.

In its capacity as the independent regulator of NHS foundation trusts, Monitor requires each NHS foundation trust board to submit a quarterly report. Performance is monitored against these reports to identify where potential and actual problems might arise. Based on these reports, Monitor assigns each NHS foundation trust financial a governance risk ratings. Risk ratings are designed to indicate the risk of a failure to comply with the foundation trust's terms of authorisation.

In their report Monitor says:

Reason

In October 2011, the Trust was found to be in significant breach[2] of its Authorisation due to failure to comply with the following terms:

1) Exercising functions effectively, efficiently and economically;

2) Governance; and

3) Healthcare and other standards.

Monitor has used its formal powers of intervention to require action. The action was driven by governance concerns related to maternity services.

Monitor's Board was concerned that the Trust board has not been taking a proactive approach to identifying and addressing problems quickly enough.

Action

To provide assurance against these concerns, Monitor has issued a statutory notice of intervention requiring the Trust to:

- Accept the appointment by Monitor of expert clinical advisors to review underlying problems in maternity services and its interface with paediatrics; and

- Commission an independent review into overall governance, to be agreed with Monitor, including their approach to quality governance.

The advisors will work with the Trust to translate their findings into an improvement plan, and the Trust will be held to account by Monitor for delivery against the plan.

Tim said: "I met with Monitor on Thursday and discussed these issues and the ongoing problems at the hospital after Eddie Kane stepped down last week. More importantly we talked about the next steps and what we can do to restore public trust. The hospital trust has four separate reviews going on at the same time and this really concerns me. Hospital bosses must heed Monitor's calls and hurry up the action they are taking so we can assess if they have lived up to the assurances they have given us."