By John Wimperis, LDRS reporter
AN INVISIBLE “artificial line” runs across Bristol and NHS bosses fear that which side of it people live on could impact their care.
This is the line between the two NHS Trusts which cover the city: the North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) which runs Southmead, and University Hospitals Bristol and Weston (UHBW), which runs the Bristol Royal Infirmary, city centre hospitals, and Weston General.
Tim Whittlestone, chief medical officer of NBT, said: “I used to live in Henleaze and I was really worried that if I got chest pain one day, I was really worried which way the ambulance would turn at the end of my street. Because I knew if it turned one way as opposed to the other way, I might have a different outcome. And that is not on.”
Now NHS bosses want to end the disparity between the city’s hospitals. Mr Whittlestone was addressing councillors from the health overview and scrutiny committees of Bristol City Council, North Somerset Council, and South Gloucestershire Council at a meeting in common held in Bristol City Hall on May 22.
Mr Whittlestone, a consultant urologist, has worked in the NHS in Bristol for 30 years. He said: “Nothing has frustrated me more than the artificial line we have drawn through our geography which says that if I live on this side of the street I am going to end up being cared for at Southmead and if I lived on the other side of the street I’d be cared for in Weston-super-Mare or the Bristol Royal Infirmary.”
He said that the urology teams of each trust had competed with each other when he joined, which he warned was “sometimes at the detriment of patient care.” NBT has since taken over urology services for the whole of the area.
But Mr Whittlestone said that there were 70 different services which were still duplicated between UHBW and NBT. He said: “Those services compete for people, they compete for staff, they compete for patients, and they compete for funding and resources. And it’s not in the best interest of our population to have that competition exist.”
Now more services could be run together as a “single managed service entity.”
Since December 2023, the two trusts had already been run as a sort of personal union, sharing the same chair and chief executive. In April the two trusts officially became a hospital group, Bristol NHS Group.
Mr Whittlestone said: “It shouldn’t matter which way the ambulance turned. And I hope that by managing services singularly, means that we have the same excellent standard of care regardless of where you live.”