A local Health watchdog is calling for Southport Hospital to get the permanent management it needs if it is not to ‘go under’.
Southport Councillor Tony Dawson is concerned that the clarity, permanence and unity of purpose which the hospital needs to try to guarantee its future still is not there.
Southport & Ormskirk NHS Trust having wasted a million pounds on disciplinary inquiries which paralysed the hospital for over a year, presently has its chief medical director Rob Gillies on ‘gardening leave’ while suspended. Meanwhile, Aintree Hospitals Trust, just up the road, seems to be going from strength to strength.
Councillor Tony Dawson says:
“The Southport Hospital Trust is many millions of pounds overspent and has just gone through 12 months of expensive and incompetent investigation into top managers while services like A&E have suffered. We have no clarity as to the future. It is unfair to patients, to staff and to the town as a whole. We deserve a permanent top team to inspire confidence in the hospital’s future.”
At the helm for the past few months has been interim chief executive, Karen Jackson (above), the latest in a series of four short-term appointments in the top job at the Trust. Ms Jackson was previously responsible for a Lincolnshire hospital which was rated inadequate by the Care Quality Commission and another which was put into special measures because of a high mortality rate. She was mired in controversy when she took a £25,000 pay rise shortly after the NHS Trust she ran was placed into ‘special measures’ after a failures were found in a Government-ordered review.
At that time, Andrew Allison of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Mrs Jackson has been rewarded handsomely for failure.”
At present there is a whole set of managers of failed Hospital Trusts floating around the NHS looking for jobs. The NHS boss who was blasted over mental health deaths scandal in the South tops the list. Katrina Percy has been touting for business on the internet as a ‘patient care expert’ and ‘strategic consultant’ on networking website – to the fury of families whose loved ones died in hospitals she ran.
Ms Percy quit her £240,000-a-year post as chief executive at Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust last year after a furore over hundreds of fatalities – including patients who hanged themselves from ligature points that had not been removed.
She boasts on ‘Linkedin’: ”I have a track record of inspiring individuals, organisations and systems to transform the way they operate and have developed a reputation as a highly regarded chief executive” and that she is ” known for ‘creating a culture which is open, accessible and energised’ and as CEO improved staff ‘productivity, innovation and quality”.
A father of a young man who died at 28 of a drugs overdose while in the care of Ms Percy’s Trust – which now faces three prosecutions over patient deaths – hasaccused the free-lance health chief of ‘rubbing salt in the wounds’ of bereaved families.
Richard West, whose son David died in 2013, said: ‘Families are up in arms that she is trying to make a comeback in this way. People are now aware of the trust and what went on there. It is a travesty that Ms Percy hasn’t faced personal public scrutiny over this.’
And former Liberal Democrat Health Minister MP Norman Lamb warned that it would be ‘entirely inappropriate’ for NHS hospitals to offer Ms Percy work. He said: “Katrina Percy clearly has a high opinion of herself but this is unlikely to be shared by the families of those who were failed in the most appalling way.
”Her boasts about improving patient care and creating an ‘open and accessible’ culture are as insulting as they are wholly inconsistent with the way Southern Health behaved during her tenure. How she can claim to offer ‘inspirational and visionary leadership’ is beyond belief after so many deaths went uninvestigated.”
Former Southern NHS Trust governor John Green, who resigned over Ms Percy’s leadership, added: ”I’m astonished she has the cheek. She brought the organisation to its knees with constant denials and cover-ups.’
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