New Cross Hospital boss: £250k free shuttle bus won't be used

The buses will see patients undergoing non-emergency surgery – such as broken hips and knee problems – treated at Cannock Chase Hospital.

The service has been taken over by the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust in the wake of the Stafford Hospital scandal and will be operated from Cannock. Health chiefs from Wolverhampton are sending 350 of their staff to Cannock to work alongside existing staff there.

As part of the move, which will start in May and take up to a year to fully implement, buses will transfer patients, staff and hospital visitors, as well as vital medical equipment, between the two hospitals.

However New Cross chief executive David Loughton, who oversaw an identical project in Coventry some years ago, said the buses won't be anywhere near at full capacity.

He said: "The facts are, it won't get used that much. Very few people use public transport to get to New Cross. I think if you saw more than four patients on each bus, you'd be lucky. That was my experience in Coventry."

The single deck buses will run every 30 minutes, getting patients to Cannock from 7.30am, with the final bus back running 20 minutes after visiting hours finish at 8pm.

They will also transfer vital medical equipment such as laboratory samples and sterile instruments between the hospitals. It has not yet been decided if the trust will run the buses itself, or if the work will be outsourced to a private sector provider.

Of the Cannock project, Mr Loughton said everything else was going to plan, with staff contracts and numbers being finalised in the coming weeks. It will cost around £20million to upgrade Cannock Chase Hospital, not £30m as first thought.