Health boss pulls out of £120,000 taxpayer-funded 'study tour'

 
Travel plans axed: Dr Tracey Batten, chief executive of Imperial NHS Trust, where reforms have led to closures

A taxpayer-funded NHS “junket” to the US was today in chaos after a London hospital chief bowed to campaigners and dropped out of the trip.

Dr Tracey Batten, the chief executive of Imperial College NHS Trust, said she would no longer take part in the £120,000 week-long “study tour” to Boston, New York, Baltimore and Richmond after details were revealed in the Evening Standard.

She had been due to fly out tomorrow as part of a 23-person delegation of health officials, GPs and patient representatives seeking to learn from US doctors how to cut the number of patients ending up in hospital for treatment.

Less than an hour after the Standard published the story, an Imperial spokeswoman confirmed Dr Batten had decided to drop out of the trip after coming under pressure from Save Our Hospitals community activists.

In a statement, Dr Batten said this afternoon: “I took up the opportunity to be part of the tour in order to learn lessons from a number of great examples of integrated and patient-led care and to build our health and social care partnerships across north west London. However, I heard the concerns of people who were at our public board and so have I decided to withdraw.”

North West London Clinical Commissioning Group, which is funding the trip using Department of Health funds, was under pressure to cancel it outright.

Andy Slaughter, Labour MP for Hammersmith, said: “This is further evidence of the management meltdown across the NHS in North West London.

“These highly paid managers should be solving the Government’s A&E crisis, not swanning off to look at privatised health services at the NHS’s expense.

“Now that Dr Batten has been shamed by the Evening Standard into withdrawing from the junket, I am calling on the other 22 bureaucrats to do likewise, unpack their suitcases, roll up their sleeves and help out our hard pressed doctors and nurses on frontline.”

Critics said the timing of the trip was appalling, with A&Es across London under intense pressure due to rising winter admissions.

Vivienne Lukey, cabinet member for health at Hammersmith and Fulham council, criticised the “terrible timing” of the trip, with winter increasing pressure on the NHS. She added: “This must be the most expensive time of the year to travel.”

Anne Drinkell, of the Save Our Hospitals campaign, said: “I think we don’t want the American model of care, which is based on the ability to pay — not on need.”

Today the London North West Healthcare Trust, which runs Northwick Park and Ealing hospitals, was once again found to have the worst delays in the entire country, with 30 per cent of patients at its main A&Es waiting more than four hours.

The US trip was organised by the management consultancy McKinsey, which has been paid more than £3.5 million for work on the Shaping a Healthier Future programme to reconfigure NHS care across eight west London boroughs.

Imperial runs Charing Cross hospital, which is due to be partly sold off and have its A&E turned into an “emergency centre” run by specialist GPs and nurses by 2020.

The first phase of Shaping A Healthier Future resulted in the closure of the A&Es at Hammersmith and Central Middlesex in September. An investigation has been launched by NHS England to see if this is to blame for the longer delays at the nearest A&E departments such as Northwick Park.

Earlier this week, Dr Batten insisted the trip could reveal innovative ways to provide health services in the community and reduce the need for an ageing and increasingly obese population to be admitted to hospital. She added: “Hopefully we can implement something that has been tried and tested.”

It was unclear this afternoon whether the trip would continue. A spokeswoman for the eight north-west London CCGs defended it, saying: “Clinicians in north-west London... will all gain a better understanding of how others are approaching integrated care, share that with others and be better informed.”

Meanwhile, Dr Batten’s deputy chief executive at Imperial, Steve McManus, has admitted that its A&E waiting times are “not good enough”. Just 77 per cent of patients were seen within four hours at St Mary’s two weeks ago, compared with the NHS target of 95 per cent.

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