Paediatric inpatient services in St John’s Hospital will begin to be restored in March, it was announced yesterday. NHS Lothian will reinstate the service from Monday to Friday each week to provide 24-hour services to children in West Lothian.
Dr Tracey Gillies, Medical Director, NHS Lothian, said the unit would function for four nights a week as an interim solution, before it is fully re-opened 24/7 in the autumn.
She added: “We are really pleased that we are able to reinstate children’s inpatient services for four nights of the week in St John’s Hospital. We have always said that we could only restore the full service when it was safe and sustainable to do so and that has been our priority throughout.
“We have conducted rigorous assessments of the new model and we know it will be able to support this short-term approach, until the new members of the team are able to take up their roles in the autumn, which will allow us to fully re-open 24/7 seven days a week.”
The resumption of overnight inpatient services, on March 18, comes three months after NHS Lothian recruited three new trainee Advanced Nurse Practitioners (ANPs) as part of a drive to create a robust staffing model.
They have become part of a multi-disciplinary team of consultants, nurses and a greater number of ANPs in paediatrics in Lothian.
It is anticipated that when all of the new staff participate in the rota in late 2019, it will provide the necessary, continuous out of hours cover.
In the meantime services will operate as normal, between Monday and Friday and children who require a short inpatient stay will be admitted to the ward as required. If children are very sick or require specialist intervention, they will continue to be admitted to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, in line with the normal protocols before the changes.
The St John’s Clinical team will work with families and if it is expected that a child may require a longer length of stay which would prevent them being discharged home at the end of the week, they will be admitted to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children instead.
A paediatric nurse will be available in the Accident and Emergency department of St John’s Hospital through the night over the weekend.
The move comes after the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) published a second review into the service and warned there was no “quick fix” for the inpatient service.
The expert body also endorsed NHS Lothian’s decision of three years ago to temporarily suspend inpatient services in order to maintain safe facilities for children and it said the service should only resume once a safe and sustainable staffing model was in place.
Since then the Paediatric Programme Board, which was created to help develop and implement a strategy to deliver safe and sustainable services, has been working on recruitment, working patterns and patient pathways to restore services.
It was agreed at their latest board meeting, on January 9th that the service was now in a position to reinstate the service which would expect to admit an average of between one and two children each day.
Board members said the service would continue recruitment campaigns for two new consultants and Advanced Nurse Practitioners to provide extra strength and flexibility within the service to support children’s services across the region, both in St John’s and in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh.
Local Labour MSP Neil Finlay gave the announcement a cautious welcome but said families would still face the stress of travelling to Edinburgh at night until the ward fully reopens in October. He added: “We have a 24 hour service four days a week, but not the rest of the time – what parents and families need is a 24/7 service.”
Scottish Conservative Health spokesman Miles Briggs said families in West Lothian would “rightly be cynical” about the announcement, claiming there had been “repeated assurances and empty words” from the government in the past.
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