Mid Staffordshire Chief Executive: 'We are not sustainable'

Mid Staffs is not financially sustainable in its current form because, despite all the efforts not only of the trust but of the local health service, we do not have a plan which brings us to financial break even by 2015. Similar financial challenges are being faced across the country by smaller general hospitals.

Like many smaller district general hospitals our services are not clinically sustainable in their current form.

This is because medicine has and will continue to become more specialised and smaller hospitals cannot attract or resource the specialist teams and infrastructure required to maintain such services

Although specialist services cannot be provided in every hospital, communities need to be able to access specialist care. One solution is to network (that is share) services with larger, specialist hospitals, which is something Mid Staffs has already begun to do successfully.