Finance Careers with Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust
Our Achievements and Future
This is an exciting time to join MEHT. We aim to become a Foundation Trust Hospital in early 2009. We are building a new hospital due to open in 2010, which will improve the working environment for staff and benefit patients. We are the regional centre for Head and Neck Surgery in Essex and for upper GI cancer services. We have embarked upon Fit for Business, a programme designed to ensure all our staff are fit, healthy and highly motivated.
Our maternity services recently achieved national recognition as excellent, being rated as one of the best in the country. Two of our consultants working within the department have recently received an Award for Innovation.
We know that our staff is our biggest resource and we work proactively to ensure that we invest in a highly effective workforce that operates within a learning organisation, whilst ensuring that patient safety remains our first priority. Thus we can proudly state that our infection rates are amongst the lowest in the country.
The Trust is building for the future and is aiming to become a Foundation Trust as well as constructing a new hospital around services rated as ‘excellent’ by the Healthcare Commission.Foundation Trust Status
During the course of the year our attention began to focus on our longer-term plan to become a Foundation Trust, with a target date to achieve Foundation Trust status in May 2009. In preparation for this the Board held strategy days and has endorsed a new vision for the future and a new simple slogan, which encapsulated the Trust’s aspirations.
Caring for you, Caring about you
Our main objectives are:
- To provide safe, high quality and well co-ordinated care
- To develop a first class workforce
- To make services more accessible
- To provide a clean, comfortable, friendly environment
- To develop business and corporate development strategies
Foundation Trusts have a significant amount of managerial and financial freedom when compared to existing NHS Trusts. The introduction of NHS Foundation Trusts represented a change in the history of the National Health Service and the way in which hospital services were managed and provided.
As a public benefit corporation, our aim, when we become a NHS Foundation Trust, will be to give the Trust more flexibility to develop the type of services we feel are necessary for our patients. It also gives patients, public and staff a greater role in helping to plan and develop local health services provided by our hospital and its associated partners.New Hospital - PFI (Private Finance Initiative) Project
This project has been approved to progress under the Government’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Contracts were signed in December 2007 and construction is now underway.
The main aim is to create a single acute hospital site in mid Essex, by maximising the use of the Broomfield Hospital site and closing St. John’s Hospital.
This means in 2010 mid Essex will have a new hospital that will bring state-of-the-art medical facilities to the area.
Broomfield Hospital is located approximately 4 miles to the north of Chelmsford, which is the county town of Essex. The hospital is in a semi-rural setting having developed on the site of a former sanatorium.
The new PFI hospital will consist of five floors, with a heli-pad on the top floor. It will be joined to the remaining Broomfield hospital building by a new atrium.
The new hospital will provide:
- 335 beds
- additional operating theatres
- a new Accident and Emergency department
- new outpatient consulting rooms
- a new emergency assessment unit
- a new pharmacy and aseptic unit
- a new renal unit
- a new endoscopy unit
- new maternity and special care baby units
Building works are now underway and progressing well.
The new hospital is due to be handed over to the Trust in the summer of 2010. It is expected that the first patients will be treated in the new facility during the autumn of 2010.