TWO major hospitals, serving the Alton area, are coming to the end of a two-week period during which they have postponed all elective activity in order to ease the pressure on emergency departments.

The move to put a temporary stop on non-emergency surgery has been described by the hospital trust as “a planned two-week programme of postponements” carried out proactively, rather than a measure they have been forced into taking.

In a statement, Dr Andrew Bishop, interim chief executive of Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Like most hospital trusts at the moment, we are facing hard choices because of unprecedented pressures on our emergency departments. These pressures impact on the capacity of the whole hospital.

“To ease the pressure on beds, we have temporarily suspended some planned surgery for those who need to be admitted at both Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester and Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital. This is a two-week measure which began last Monday (February 13).

“We realise that this will cause inconvenience and concern for those patients who have had their planned surgery postponed and we apologise for that.

“This was a difficult decision to make, but we have taken these measures in order to increase our capacity to treat emergency patients who need to be admitted to a hospital bed.

“At the end of this two-week period, we expect to be in a better position to meet the demands faced by our emergency departments and be able to continue the schedule of planned surgery. All postponed surgery will be rebooked as soon as possible.”

This somewhat dramatic decision on behalf of the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust comes as a BBC report revealed that nearly two-thirds of hospital services in England could be cut or scaled back in a major overhaul of the health service, resulting from a review of all 44 regions charged with coming up with a strategy to make services fit for the 21st Century.

The plans have been developed following the publication of NHS England’s five-year plan for the health service in 2014.

That led to a commitment by government to an £8bn increase in the frontline NHS budget during this parliament. In return, the NHS has to make £22bn of efficiency savings.

A key part of that is reorganising how services are run locally. NHS England says the aim is to make the health service more efficient and better geared to keeping people well and out of hospital, but critics fear the plans are cuts.

In Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, the challenge is to address a funding gap, forecast as reaching £577m in health and £192m in social care by 2020-2021, if nothing is done.

As a result, critical health and social care services are under pressure to redesign how they work together.

With demand for health and care provision growing at an unsustainable rate, the plan is to shift the whole system toward prevention and self-care, with greater investment in primary and community care, addressing the issues of delayed patient discharge, redesigning unsustainable acute hospital services, and making tangible improvements to mental health service provision, in a bid to create a financially sustainable health system for the future.

In addition, there is a need to address staffing problems by working with the workforce to better manage staffing, development, recruiting and retention, and to drive up productivity and efficiency.

Based on prevention rather than cure, the aim is to work to reduce rates of smoking, obesity and alcohol-related conditions, to reduce activity growth in the acute sector, and to improve transfer of care, thereby improving bed capacity to release the equivalent of 300 beds.

It is also planned to reduce the size of the Hampshire and the Isle of Wight estate by 19 per cent with resulting cuts to estate costs of £24m.

Meanwhile, on a more local level, work continues on the North Hampshire Clinical Commissioning Group health review for Alton.

Commissioners for the clinical commissioning group and patient representatives from the Alton Stakeholders’ Reference Group are working together on projects aimed at developing improved services for the frail and elderly; primary care services (it is noted that there has been “outstanding commitment from current providers”), including possible provision of an urgent care hub; children’s health and maternity services; mental health and wellbeing, with a perceived local requirement for a health and wellbeing hub in Alton; and diagnostics and outpatient clinics.

On the latter, there is felt to be an expanded role for Alton Community Hospital, in the consolidation and improvement of plain film X-rays and ultrasound.

However, with the possibilities of Bordon and possibly the critical treatment hospital near Basingstoke (or no critical treatment hospital, but with further centralisation of specialist services), this situation could change.