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Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust runs Russells Hall Hospital and Dudley Guest Hospital in Dudley and Corbett Hospital Outpatient Centre, in Stourbridge, West Midlands, England. It also provides community health services to the borough.
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It agreed in July 2015 to join the Black Country Alliance with Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust. The trusts plan to create a jointly owned Company Limited by Guarantee which will enable them to jointly bid for contracts. There will also be some consolidation of administrative functions like payroll, information technology and estates.
Performance
The trust which currently employs 4,500 staff is planning to reduce its staff by about 400 between 2014 and 2016 in order to deal with its £6.7 million deficit.
It was named by the Health Service Journal as one of the top hundred NHS trusts to work for in 2015. At that time it had 4177 full time equivalent staff and a sickness absence rate of 3.8%. 72% of staff recommend it as a place for treatment and 67% recommended it as a place to work.
Controversy
In July 2013 two former governors of the Trust, Bill Etheridge and Major Robbins, called for bosses at the borough’s hospitals to be sacked in the wake of the Keogh Review which criticised staffing levels at Russells Hall Hospital and the Trust’s complaints process. They claimed they quit in frustration after being repeatedly told they were unable to raise issues relating to operational matters.
In January 2014 allegations by John Marchant, the former head of security, were reported that staff had routinely forced vulnerable patients to stay in their rooms – or even confined them to their beds - despite them posing no danger to anyone. The Care Quality Commission is to investigate. In March 2014 it was reported that David Ore, who managed security staff across the three hospitals, after repeatedly raising concerns had been suspended in November 2012 and sacked five months later after a disciplinary hearing. He claimed children and pensioners were being restrained and locked in hospital cubicles for up to 12 hours without food or drink. He won an appeal but was again ordered out on ‘special leave’ in January – two days after an article about Russells Hall Hospital restraining patients appeared in the media and has now been given notice of redundancy.
Facilities in the trust's Private finance initiative development are run by Interserve. In May 2015 it was reported that there were tensions between the company and the trust and that the company, which runs the hospital restaurant, was considering banning hospital staff who do not buy food from eating there. In November 2014 the trust had asked the company to launch new menus and invest £500,000 in heated trolleys because patients had complained about the temperature of their food. The company demanded access to the trust’s wifi service to process meal orders and refused to implement new menus without it. The trust wanted to charge the company for access, and the trust board was told the company’s response was not positive.