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The new single-roomed hospital in Liverpool has had a rocky start.

It opened in October after years of delay and was faced with one of the worst NHS winters on record.

But James Sumner, the still relatively fresh CEO of Liverpool University Hospitals, is confident the benefits of the new building and care model are now starting to be felt.

Although it has fewer beds than the old hospital, he said “massive reductions” are being seen on length of stay, while bed closures due to infection outbreaks have been eliminated.

He said: “We think that’s down to much improved assessment facilities, but also single rooms are playing a part in that… The reports are that our patients are getting so much more sleep, that they’re recovering quicker.

“And then generally speaking, [in the old hospital] you’d have about 60 or 70 beds closed due to infections every month, but that’s now zero since we moved in here.”

The LoS numbers, shared with HSJ, are hugely encouraging for a hospital that desperately needs some hope, although emergency medics, who wrote an anguished letter to the exec team in November, will want to see these improvements sustained over a longer period before they’re convinced.

The first cuts aren’t deep enough

Earlier this year Lincolnshire asked NHS England if it could officially forecast a year-end deficit.

The move was notable because it was one of the first to do so under a new “protocol” meant to dissuade trusts and systems from doing exactly this.

Now it is looking at a £27m deficit, down from £35m a few months ago. That is not enough for NHSE, which has indicated the integrated care system needs to shave another £7m from its overspend.

Such toing-and-froing is likely to be replicated in other areas in the coming months as it becomes clear that ICSs will not be able to turn around their finances before the end of the financial year.

Lincolnshire’s financial woes also mean the system, which is one of a handful of ICSs in the highest level of central oversight, will now stay in the successor to special measures for at least another six months.

It was always going to be a big ask to turn round the structural funding gap inherited by the ICS in a year, but NHSE made its displeasure clear in meetings with the ICS CEO in which the regional team expressed “significant disappointment” and said the ICS needed “stronger grip”. 

Also on hsj.co.uk today

The fashionable stance for any NHS strategy at the moment is to set out the highest number of partnerships possible to get involved in, but the risk is that no collaboration will add proper value, writes Richard Taunt in a comment piece. And in London Eye, Ben Clover looks at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation Trust’s report on the catastrophic meltdown at its data centres during last summer’s heatwave.