Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust

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Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Geography
Location	Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England
Organisation
Care system	NHS
Hospital type	Teaching
Affiliated university	University of Nottingham
Services
Beds	1664
History
Founded	2006
Links
Website	http://www.nuh.nhs.uk/
Lists	Hospitals in England

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) is the UK’s fourth largest acute teaching trust. It was established on 1 April 2006 following the merger of Nottingham City Hospital and the Queen's Medical Centre. They provide acute and specialist services to 2.5 million people within Nottingham and surrounding communities from the Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC) and the City Hospital campuses. In 2009/10 they have an annual budget in excess of £687m of public sector funding and employ approximately 12,000 staff. The Trust has over 1,500 volunteers.^{[citation needed]}

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Departments[edit]

The Trust is the principal provider of acute general, specialist and tertiary hospital care to the population of Nottingham, receiving 98 per cent of all elective and urgent referrals from primary care trusts in Nottinghamshire. They currently have approximately 1,663 hospital beds. Activities include general hospital services for the local population and a wide range of specialist services for regional and national patients. They provide a range of general acute and specialist services across nine clinical directorates. These are:
• Acute Medicine • Cancer and Associated Specialties • Diabetic, Renal & Cardiovascular • Diagnostic & Clinical Support • Digestive Diseases and Thoracic • Family Health • Head and Neck • Musculoskeletal and Neurosciences • Specialist Support

Research[edit]

The Trust has a close partnership with The University of Nottingham across a vast range of research activities. This includes the three Biomedical Research Units in gastroenterology, hearing and respiratory medicine.
Nottingham University Hospitals was one of only two national pilots for a trust-wide programme called ‘Releasing Time to Care – the Productive Ward’. The aim of this is to release nurse time from unnecessary or ‘wasteful’ activity.
Bliss, the special care baby charity are currently funding research into the benefits to premature and sick babies of manuka honey dressings.

Campus[edit]

The City Hospital campus is the older of the two campuses, founded in 1903. It occupies a large 90-acre (360,000 m2) site on the ring road to the north of the city centre. It provides general medical and surgical services to the local population, and is the location for many specialties such as cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery, breast surgery, plastic surgery, nephrology, oncology, urology, and infectious diseases.
QMC campus was the first purpose built teaching hospital in the UK, and also contains The University of Nottingham Medical and Nursing Schools and Nottinghamshire Healthcare mental health wards. During the year 2008/09 a proportion of outpatient and day case patient care was transferred to the NHS Treatment Centre operated by Nations Healthcare. NUH staff have been seconded to provide a service to the organisation, but it operates independently of the Trust.
The two hospitals are connected by a link bus which provides a free service for patients and staff.

Dermatology[edit]

In 2013 Circle won a dermatology contract from the Nottinghamshire Clinical Commissioning Groups for services across the Trust and their Nottingham NHS Treatment Centre. Circle also runs the Nottingham Treatment Centre on the QMC site. Nottingham was previously regarded as a national centre of excellence for dermatology. In December 2014 it was announced that six of the eight consultants had left rather than transfer to Circle. It was suggested that the doctors were concerned over job stability at a private employer, and had fears that a profit-driven provider would not offer opportunities for academic research or training. The trust announced that it would stop providing acute dermatology services to new patients from February 2014. The President of the British Association of Dermatologists said this was "just one example of the many fires we are fighting across the UK to try to keep dermatology services open in the face of poorly thought-out commissioning decisions and the Government’s lack of understanding of the implications of pushing NHS services into unsustainable models provided by commercially driven private providers or enterprises,” ^[1] The exodus of doctors left a department with too few staff to function, and put Circle under "financial pressure" because they had to pay nearly £300,000 per year each for six locum doctors, some insufficiently qualified to be on the specialist register. A report, by Dr Chris Clough of Kings College Hospital, London, called for the trust, Circle and Rushcliffe Clinical Commissioning Group to work together to solve the problem.^[2] The handling of these changes by both commissioners and providers was described as an ‘unmitigated disaster'. The consultants had concerns about transferring “to an uncertain model at Circle”. The consultants said the company had no experience of the highly specialist work they provided and that this would “inevitably lead to a downscaling of their ability to deliver effective training and research”.^[3]

Performance[edit]

The trust was one of 26 responsible for half of the national growth in patients waiting more than four hours in accident and emergency over the 2014/5 winter.^[4]
The trust expects to finish 2015-16 with a deficit of more than £42 million as a result of changes to the NHS tariff.^[5]