'Lincs health trusts merger will cut bureaucracy'

Health bosses say the formal merger of two Lincolnshire NHS trusts will help patients by slashing bureaucracy.

Lincolnshire Community Health Services NHS Trust, which provides services such as district nurses and urgent treatment centres, and United Lincolnshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust have been working together as an "NHS group" for the past two years.

Now it is being proposed that the two permanently merge into a single trust.

It would reduce "unnecessary complexity in patient pathways", the NHS group said.

Prof Karen Dunderdale, chief executive of Lincolnshire Community and Hospitals NHS Group, said the move would do away with duplications in bureaucracy and IT, which would make it "easier to provide care".

She said health bosses understood "the frustrations our patients feel when they've got to tell us things more than once".

"At the moment, somebody could access our urgent treatment centres and then have to re-access our accident and emergency departments," she said.

"They have to go through the whole process twice because bureaucracy and IT and some of the business that we have to put in place for two organisations to keep us legal and safe is getting in the way of that."

The plan is for the merger to be completed next April.

The NHS group said it did not foresee job losses as a result.

"This is about having better services, not reducing services," said Dunderdale.

NHS England has approved the initial proposal but it needs final approval from both NHS England and the health secretary.

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