Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust is an NHS Foundation Trust operating in the South of England. The trust was created on 1 October 2014 by the acquisition of Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust by Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the first ever merger of two NHS Foundation Trusts. It runs Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot, Wexham Park Hospital near Slough, Berkshire, and Frimley Park Hospital in Frimley, Surrey.
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Background
The Trust serves a population of approximately 800,000, spanning Surrey, NW Hampshire, East Berkshire and South Buckinhamshire. The two acute sites are based at Frimley Park and Wexham Park Hospitals with Heatherwood Hospital serving as an elective base. The combined non-elective activity exceeds 220,000 attendances per annum through the Emergency Departments, ranking it within the top 10 for activity in England. The Trust provides a broad range of secondary care services as well as tertiary primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI), hyper-acute stroke services, vascular and plastic surgery.
The Care Quality Commission has rated the Frimley Park site as 'outstanding' and Wexham Park and Heatherwood Hospitals as 'good'.
Leadership
The Trust is led by a Trust Board consisting of 7 executive and 8 non-executive directors. Sir Andrew Morris has been the chief executive since 1991. As a foundation trust there is an elected council of governors.
Developments
The Trust has secured funding to build both a new emergency room, as well as a care unit for infants and mothers, at Wexham Park, and plans to build an elective centre at the Heatherwood location. The three Berkshire Clinical commissioning groups complained that they had been asked to provide £11m extra funding to support the trust’s “integration costs” over the next few years, in addition to normal payments for activity.
In March 2015 the Department of Health agreed a package of support to the new Trust: £127.2m of public dividend capital and £59m of loan funding to support rebuilding and refurbishment of parts of the Heatherwood site. It is planned to save £8m by sharing buildings and to make £28m from selling land at Heatherwood Hospital. The merged organisation is expected to run a deficit until 2020-21 and meeting this brings the total cost of financial support for the merger to £328 million.
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 4948 full time equivalent staff and a sickness absence rate of 3%. 89% of staff recommend it as a place for treatment and 77% recommended it as a place to work.
The Care Quality Commission in February 2016 said that the “remarkable” improvement in care at Wexham Park Hospital after the merger was the “most impressive” turnaround it has seen.
The trust is running its own Sustainability and transformation plan - the only trust to do so. It proposes to establish a network of 14 integrated primary and acute care hubs in Farnham, Fleet, Farnborough, Aldershot, Yateley, Surrey Heath, Bracknell, Ascot, Windsor, Maidenhead, and Slough. Each is to be a “single point of access” for social, mental and physical health care. An increase in primary care expenditure of 21% by 2021 is planned, and savings of £65 million anticipated based on workforce changes and a shared electronic care record. These require £20 million more investment than the announced funding of £47 million from the sustainability and transformation fund.