Multi-million-pound boost to children’s care in the Midlands
Birmingham Children’s Hospital will have access to funding worth up to an additional £20m to dramatically reduce the time to treatment and tackle the delays in children’s care caused by the pandemic.
It is part of a collaborative with some of England’s leading specialist children’s hospitals which has successfully secured the funding as part of the national elective accelerator programme. The collaborative will work together to boost treatment for children and increase levels of planned activity, including outpatients, diagnostics and surgical treatment, to 120% of pre-pandemic levels in order to reduce delays and access to care.
This will be supported through clinical transformation, use of digital innovation and collaborating across the partners in order to deliver sustainable changes that will benefit children, young people and their families for years to come.
The programme will also help to support the wider recovery of NHS services across other specialist children’s centres in England who will be able to bid for strategic funding, with the support of the collaborative, to fast track elective recovery schemes in order to ensure that their children and young people get the care they need more quickly within their population.
The paediatric collaborative is one of the government’s 13 Accelerated Systems Programme’s that have been supported nationally and is made up of Alder Hey, Birmingham Children’s, Great Ormond Street, Manchester and Sheffield Children’s hospitals. Each national programme will have access to up to £20m of upfront investment to enable delivery of proposed key interventions.
Sarah-Jane Marsh, Chief Executive of Birmingham’s Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust (BWC) and Chair of the National Maternity and Children and Young People’s Transformation Programme, who has helped to lead the bid said: “This is amazing news that will help us see and treat more children and young people across England, improving many of the young lives that have been dramatically impacted by the pandemic.
“It is great to see the country’s children’s hospitals working together in a way that will not only bring immediate benefits, by reducing the time to treatment and diagnosis, but also support innovation and longer term improvements in the way we provide care for our children and young people.”
The programme will increase the volume of planned care significantly with each organisation achieving 120% of 2019/20 (pre-pandemic) activity levels in order to address the delays in treatment.
Steve Cumley, Chief Operating Officer at BWC, said: “We will increase access to treatment and diagnosis through innovation, use of technology and collaboration to deliver sustainable benefits for children and young people.”