Hospitals awarded £2m after cutting waiting times

Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust (SaTH) has been awarded £2m to improve services as a reward for cutting waiting times.

It was given the money by the government after drastically reducing the number of patients waiting a long time for planned care.

It said its overall waiting list had reduced by 10,000 and the number of children waiting for treatment had fallen by 40%.

The trust said the extra funding would be used to improve inpatient and acute assessment capacity and to provide new equipment for diagnostics, theatres and outpatients.

At the end of March, SaTH said 48.1% of patients were waiting less than 18 weeks, but by the end of November that had risen to 65.5%.

This exceeded its targets for this year and next, it said.

The hospital trust said it had also cut the proportion of patients waiting more than 52 weeks for planned care by 92%.

work.

The number of patients from England who were waiting for operations fell from 41,669 in March to 31,652 in September.

The trust said this was achieved by improving access to diagnostics, increasing the number of outpatient appointments and increasing the number of operations taking place from 1,200 a month to 1,600.

It said the £2m was given through an incentive scheme which "recognises organisations which significantly reduce waiting times for planned care".

The hospital trust's CEO, Ned Hobbs, said he was "incredibly proud of the progress we are making, and of the hard work of our clinical and operational teams who have worked together to drive improvements".

The Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting, said the staff at the trust were "leading the way to a brighter future for the NHS" and he wanted to reward their

Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.