Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital fined £500k after targets missed

Bosses at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton have had to shell out thousands of pounds every month due to delays in patients being treated.

It comes as bosses spend £30million on a new Emergency Centre, which includes a badly-needed A&E unit.

In total finance chiefs have spent £462,944 in fines for not hitting 'referral to treatment targets'.

According to NHS guidelines patients must be referred to a specialist within 18 weeks of the hospital receiving a referral letter.

They will have been referred by a GP, dentist or other health professional.

On top of that fine the trust which runs the hospital has also paid £95,000 in fines for not getting ambulances out on time after arriving arriving at New Cross.

Ambulances must get back out within 30 minutes or the hospital is given a £200 fine for each occasion that the ambulance is delayed.

And if the delay goes over an hour, it rises to £1,000 per instance.

Those measures were introduced last April and for the first two months the Wolverhampton Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) - which administers and collects the fines - waived the payment.

But delays in the next 10 months amounted to £95,000, making total fines £557,944 for the trust in 2013/14.

Simon Evans, head of performance at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, said money paid to the CCG was redirected back into the Wolverhampton health economy by the health body.

The CCG and the trust work closely on where the money would be best placed to go.

Mr Evans said: "All of the fines have been paid, however, the trust has been working closely with NHS Wolverhampton CCG partners to refine pathways and develop initiatives to improve quality which will be funded from the fines monies.

"The fines for RTT are related to trauma and orthopaedic and general surgery specialities. These are the two most pressurised specialities across the country.

"The fine for A&E is lower than originally forecast as the CCG elected not to fine the trust during months one and two whilst the new process was being established."

The new £30m Emergency Centre will be unveiled in November 2015. Bosses say it will be one of the finest of its kind in the country.

It will include an A&E unit three times the size of the current department, which has been labelled by trust chief executive David Loughton as 'not fit for purpose'.

Huge numbers of patients have flooded through the hospital's doors with record numbers seen in the past 12 month.

Extra patients have travelled from Stafford and Cannock with the ongoing dissolution of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust.