Inside the Future Hospital waiting room: disease control

Monday 10 December 2018

Whilst the fate of Jersey’s new hospital hangs in the balance, and the delivery date gets further and further away, the day-to-day reality faced by staff and patients in facilities that have been deemed “not fit for purpose” is rife with challenges.

By most recent estimations, a new General Hospital for Jersey will be delivered at the end of 2027 at the earliest - but what are the risks to the island’s healthcare in the interim?

In a series called 'Inside the Future Hospital waiting room', Express hears from the Group Managing Director of Health and Community Services, Robert Sainsbury, who has specific concerns about the effect of the wait.

He published a ‘Clinical Risks Report’ which was submitted to the board of politicians tasked with reviewing the decision-making process surrounding site selection for the £466million Future Hospital project.

Pictured: The lengthy review of the decision-making that led up to choosing the current hospital site as the location for the new build.

Mr Sainsbury told Express: “what I focused on was the risk of delay… we’re basing this on the issues we’re going to have if we don’t deliver the Hospital within the timeline.”

The Group Managing Director explained that his report “…very much reflects the issues that drove the original case for change as to why we need a new hospital.” 

The first in the series addresses disease control in a hospital building that doesn’t allow for infectious patients to be properly isolated – an issue that Mr Sainsbury described as “one of the biggest” faced by hospital staff in the face of such a delay. 

Pictured: Mr Sainsbury says that "one of the biggest issues" hospital staff face is how to isolate infectious patients to prevent the spread of bugs around the wards.

In his report, Mr Sainsbury quotes from statistics which put this issue into context. He writes that “the number of in-hospital infections in the NHS has increased from 5,972 in 2008 to 48,815 in 2017.” This means that “hospital patients are more than eight times as likely to catch an infection as they were in 2008.”

Mr Sainsbury told Express: “One of the biggest issues we that we have within the current site and that we project is going to be an ongoing issue is around how we manage infection prevention and control.”

Although Mr Sainsbury explained that this is “becoming a really emerging issue within most hospitals”, but in Jersey’s hospital, being an “older building”, the risk is particularly acute given the lack of appropriate isolation facilities.

Mr Sainsbury continued: “It’s well-known that there are lots of bugs and lots of superbugs and lots of germs and growing issues with disease control that are becoming quite challenging for Hospitals to manage."

Pictured: The Hospital Policy Development Board have reopened the question of where the Future Hospital should be built.

“In Jersey General… and this is typical of most older buildings, we don’t have a huge amount of side rooms or cubicles or what we would call ‘isolation rooms’ to manage this kind of patient.” 

To cope with the lack of these dedicated cubicles, Mr Sainsbury explained, hospital staff often have to close off entire bays for one single patient to ensure they are isolated, but “that can be quite disruptive”  and “can lead to real capacity problems."

Until a new hospital is delivered, Mr Sainsbury said that he “…predict[s] that’s going to get worse in time”.

Tomorrow, we'll be looking at maintaining dignity during end-of-life care.