Hospitals in Southport and St. Helens merge to form new trust

St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals and Southport and Ormskirk Hospital are merging to form a new trust.

From Saturday they'll be known as Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

The NHS says that it was originally established to ensure Southport & Ormskirk could continue to provide high quality and sustainable services to local people.

It adds that the aim is to give five star care across the Mersey and West Lancashire areas, with the current hospital sites playing a central role in the new organisation.

The new trust will serve a population more than 600,000 people with a combined workforce of around 9,000 staff delivering acute hospital care, intermediate care, primary care, and community-based services.

In addition it will continue to provide regional services for burns, plastic surgery, and spinal injuries, to more than four million people across Mersey and West Lancashire, Cheshire, The Isle of Man and North Wales.

The NHS says that the Mersey and West Lancashire Trust will provide increased job opportunities, boost the number of patients seen and treated, and provide investment where it’s needed.

It also says that it will help to reduce waiting times, provide greater access for patients and improve patient choice over where they attend for diagnosis and treatment.

And hospital leaders are keen to stress that the new trust will provide locally based services.

Nicola Bunce, Director of Corporate Services at St. Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust says, "The need for change was very much driven .... and is embedded in all of the plans around maintaining local services for local people. Bigger organisation, more resilience, but at the heart of that is that people have access to local services."

Lesley Neary, Chief Operating Officer for Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust adds, "One of the main objectives of this change is to ensure that services remain local for local patients. We do want clinical teams to work together across the new trust, but we do expect that services will continue to be delivered within the current locations."