Prof Sir Alan Craft launches scathing attack on new North East hospital

Jul 31 2009 by Helen Rae, The Journal

ONE of the country’s leading experts on childhood medicine has launched a scathing attack on plans to build a specialist emergency hospital in the North East.

In the £200m proposals, health chiefs want to transfer all serious emergency care cases from North Tyneside and Wansbeck general hospitals to a new purpose-built centre near Moor Farm roundabout, Annitsford, Cramlington.

Serious emergency care, consultant-led maternity services and special care baby units will be removed from North Tyneside and Wansbeck to the acute care site as they need to be at the same premises.

But in an unprecedented attack Prof Sir Alan Craft, former president of Royal College of Paediatrics, said the proposals for the restructuring of children’s services in the region was concerning.

Prof Craft, who lives in Embleton, Northumberland, said it would be difficult to staff paediatric services at the new emergency hospital due to a shortage of doctors and nurses and that it would be better for the North East’s general hospitals to work collaboratively with the new Great North Children’s Hospital, in Newcastle.

Prof Craft, a consultant paediatrician based at the RVI, and his wife, Anne, children’s nurse and director of nursing and former health visitor for North Tyneside, sent a letter to The Journal outlining their views.

It says the proposals to “develop in-patient emergency services for children in Cramlington go against all current guidance and defies common sense”.

“One of us has spent the last 10 years involved at a national and international level in the reorganisation of paediatric services to make them fit for the 21st century, taking into account all of the pressures and drivers such as changing patterns of illness and workforce shortages.

“Almost universally, there is a move towards networks of care with larger regional hospitals working with their neighbours to provide the best possible care as close to home as possible.