Hospitals merge to form NHS trust

Source: Exec UK

Date :01/10/2007 16:18:49

A substantial merger of some of London’s leading teaching hospitals and Imperial College was launched today.

The merger is designed to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of academic medicine and treatment.

St Mary’s NHS Trust and Hammersmith Hospital will join with Imperial College London and its medical school to form the UK's first Academic Health Science Centre.

NHS trust

The trust will be the biggest single NHS organisation in the country with a combined teaching, research and treatment budget of close to £1 billion a year.

Made up of five hospitals – Charing Cross, Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea, Hammersmith, St Mary's and the Western Eye – and integrating with Imperial College London, the new Trust has an annual turnover of £760 million and employs 9,700 staff.

The new organisation has one of the largest portfolios of services in the country and expects to treat more than one million patients a year.

It will offer more than 50 clinical specialities, from conception to end of life care.

Academic health centres

The fusion of care, research and teaching echo that of powerful academic health centres in the US, such as those at Stanford, Harvard, and the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Professor Steve Smith, principal of Imperial College medicine faculty will be the chief executive of the new trust as well as principal of the medical school.

He said the move reflected the need for scale and for the integration of research, care and teaching if the UK were to attract the best staff and hold its own in global competition for biomedical research.

He said added that it was also crucial in helping to get the results of research into day to day medical practice much more quickly.

October 1 2007