Stafford hospital crisis: No guarantees child A&E will ever return
Health bosses have failed to give assurances that children's A&E services will ever return to County Hospital.
It comes as the Express & Star's petition demanding the A&E reopen to children immediately smashed through the 4,000 names barrier.
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New details have emerged surrounding the controversial temporary closure of the children's emergency centre at Weston Road. It comes following an annual general meeting of University of North Midlands NHS Trust, which runs the hospital.
More than 40 people, including Stafford MP Jeremy Lefroy and Support Stafford Hospital campaigners, attended the two-hour public briefing which saw security staff manning the doors.
They were told:
The decision to suspend it was based on a draft report sent to the trust one month earlier.
The final report will not be made public until October.
Reinstatement of a minor injuries unit for children will take weeks despite the fact the trust thinks it already has the staff to deliver it.
The main long-term issue surrounds concerns the hospital cannot resuscitate seriously ill children.
Following a presentation of the trust's performance in 2015-16, the first request made to interim chief executive Robert Courteney-Harris was to give a 'cast-iron' guarantee the suspension of children's emergency services would be temporary.
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Instead, he promised only to bring back a MIU in the short-term but not until chiefs have visited Southmead Hospital in Bristol, which has a similar set-up, however that will not take place for around 10 days.
While the long-term future of the services for more critical child patients depends on the outcome of a review, carried out by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH).
This could take up to three months.
Mr Courteney-Harris said: "Eighty per cent of patients who turned up to the children's emergency centre were classified as having minor injuries. It is the intention to bring that service back as soon as practical, possibly within a few weeks or less
"It will not mean a huge amount of training for that.
"The real issue is around resuscitation of seriously-ill children which, fortunately, does not occur very often.
"In order to deliver that care efficiently you need people who do it a lot of the time and the only people who do that are paediatric registrars.
"There is still the issue that children brought to us in extreme conditions, we could not guarantee care to the national standard.
"That is the thing we have to deal with, with the Royal College."
