Patients should be admitted to the new Royal Preston Hospital only as “a last resort”, according to the outgoing boss of the trust that runs the existing facility.
Kevin McGee, chief executive of Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust , says that he hopes to see a transformation in the way health services are delivered by the time the new hospital opens its doors in around a decade’s time. The 62-year-old will have long left the NHS behind by that point, after last week announcing that he was retiring from the service after a lifelong career in it , to take up a new post as the director general of health in Gibraltar.
Mr. McGee – who, prior to joining LTH in September 2021, led East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust from 2014, before also adding Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to his duties in 2019 – has long been candid about what he sees as the need for the health service radically to rethink how it operates in order to remain sustainable.
“You’d then have elective [pre-planned] care that was centralised, say, on three different sites across Lancashire, instead of taking place on a number of different sites. He believes that the biggest challenge to the NHS – and healthcare around the world – is the need to recruit and retain staff in what has become a global market. It is a problem with which he expects to be confronted in Gibraltar as he has been in the UK – although LTH has recently achieved a zero percent vacancy rate for registered ward-based nurses after a successful international recruitment campaign.
However, the “firefighting” required to deal with that plethora of day-to-day demands has not smothered much-needed innovations, Kevin McGee claims – citing expanded elective operating capacity and a new ophthalmology unit at Chorley Hospital and improvements to the flow of patients through the Royal Preston’s under-pressure A&E.
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