St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was formed in 1991, and is based in
Whiston, Merseyside
Whiston is a town and civil parish within the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley in Merseyside, England. Previously recorded within the historic county of Lancashire, it is located east of Liverpool. The population was 13,629 at the 2001 Census ...
.
It runs two hospitals:
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Whiston Hospital
Whiston Hospital is an acute general hospital in Whiston, Merseyside, though its postal address places it in adjacent Prescot. The hospital, along with St Helens Hospital, is managed by the St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Hi ...
- the primary site and trust headquarters providing emergency and acute inpatient services, alongside a maternity unit and the Mersey Regional Burns and Plastic Surgery Unit.
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St Helens Hospital, a diagnostic and treatment centre which houses non-acute outpatient services, transitional rehabilitation facilities and a day case surgical suite.
In 2012 the trust's bid for
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 st ...
status was escalated for Department of Health scrutiny, after a series of issues.
The trust is the lead employer for junior doctors in the North West of England, holding contracts for around 5,500 doctors in training. In November 2020 it set up the North West Doctors in Training Collaborative Staff Bank, enabling hospitals to broadcast shifts they have been unable to fill and minimise the administrative burden of using temporary staff, and enabling junior doctors who pick up additional shifts to receive their pay via their normal payroll service.
PFI
The trust has a substantial
Private Finance Initiative contract.
Innisfree Ltd,
Vinci SA
Vinci (corporately styled VINCI) is a French concessions and construction company founded in 1899 as Société Générale d'Enterprises. Its head office is in Nanterre, in the western suburbs of Paris. Vinci is listed on Euronext's Paris sto ...
.
Medirest and
GE are the partners. The 35 year PFI contract is delivered by NewHospitals, a Special Purpose Company formed by
Taylor Woodrow
Taylor Woodrow was one of the largest housebuilding and general construction companies in Britain. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index until its merger with rival George Wimpey to create Ta ...
and Innisfree.
Primary care
The trust took over Marshalls Cross Medical Centre in 2017 and planned to take over five more general practices in St Helens in 2019.
Information technology
The trust was an early adopter of
Electronic health records and in 2010 it was the first trust to stop using paper medical records in clinical practice.
It was also an early adopter of Electronic Staff Records after it became the lead employer for approximately 2,300 junior doctors on the Cheshire and Merseyside
Deanery programme.
It reduced the rates of patients who did not attend radiology department appointments in 2021 using the efficienC appointment management text messaging solution provided by Wellbeing Software. There was an average reduction of 81% over the pilot term in patients who did not attend.
Performance
The trust did very well in the 2014 cancer patient experience survey and has agreed to pair up with
Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is a medium sized district general hospital working across two sites in Surrey: St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey and Ashford Hospital in Ashford.
History
Ashford Hospital was developed from ...
, which did badly, in a scheme intended to “spread and accelerate innovative practice via peer to peer support and learning”.
It was named by the ''
Health Service Journal'' as one of the top hundred
National Health Service
The National Health Service (NHS) is the umbrella term for the publicly funded healthcare systems of the United Kingdom (UK). Since 1948, they have been funded out of general taxation. There are three systems which are referred to using the " ...
(NHS) trusts to work for in 2015. At that time it had 4136 full time equivalent staff and a sickness absence rate of 3.75%. 78% of staff recommend it as a place for treatment and 72% recommended it as a place to work.
After an inspection in August 2015 the trust was one of only three in England rated "outstanding" by 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 ...
. The hospital's outpatient department was said to be "the best we have inspected so far".
See also
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List of NHS trusts
This list of NHS trusts in England provides details of current and former English NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts, acute hospital trusts, ambulance trusts, mental health trusts, and the unique Isle of Wight NHS Trust. , 217 extant trusts ...
References
{{Authority control
NHS hospital trusts
Medical and health organisations based in Merseyside