East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust is an

NHS foundation trust A foundation trust is a semi-autonomous organisational unit within the National Health Service in England. They have a degree of independence from the Department of Health and Social Care (and, until the abolition of SHAs in 2013, their local s ...

in the

East of England The East of England is one of the nine official regions of England. This region was created in 1994 and was adopted for statistics purposes from 1999. It includes the ceremonial counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire ...

. It runs

Colchester Hospital Colchester Hospital is a district general hospital located in Colchester, Essex. It is managed by East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust. History The hospital, then named Colchester District General Hospital, was opened by Queen Eliza ...

in Colchester, Essex and

Ipswich Hospital Ipswich Hospital is a large district general hospital in Heath Road, Ipswich, Suffolk, England. It is now managed by East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust which was formed on 1 July 2018 by the merging of Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust w ...

in Ipswich, Suffolk, as well as several smaller community hospitals in the surrounding area.

History

The trust was formed on 1 July 2018 by the merger of Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust and The Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust. The trust used Datix in 2022 to report inappropriate attendances at A&E to GP practices. These reports were said to increase stress on GPs and to be ‘a major source of strife locally which the

Local Medical Committee A local medical committee is a statutory body in the UK. LMCs are recognised by successive NHS Acts as the professional organisation representing individual GPs and GP practices as a whole to the primary care organisation. The NHS Act 1999 extended ...

has repeatedly sought to defuse’.

Development

In 2019 the trust announced plans to end open access to the Accident and Emergency department. The plan is that patients will arrive at a newly built urgent treatment centre at Colchester hospital run by the trust and the local GP confederation which will deal with minor injuries and illnesses. From there the trust expects less than half of the present numbers will need the A&E department. It launched an automated e-referrals process in 2019 which it said saved 27,000 hours of staff time in the first sixteen months of operation. It hopes to prevent 13,000 missed outpatient appointments.

References

External links

* {{Official website
Inspection reports
from the

Care Quality Commission The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom. It was established in 2009 to regulate and inspect health and social care services in England. I ...

NHS foundation trusts Health in Essex Health in Suffolk Organisations based in Essex