Multi-million-pound boost to children’s care

Sheffield Children’s is collaborating with four other UK specialist children’s hospitals to reduce time to treatment and decrease delays in children’s care caused by the pandemic.

A collaborative which includes Sheffield Children’s, Birmingham Women and Children’s Hospital Trust, Alder Hey, Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital, has successfully secured funding worth up to an additional £20m as part of the national elective surgery programme.

The hospitals will work together to boost treatment for children and increase levels of planned activity, including outpatients, diagnostics and surgical treatment, to 120% of pre-pandemic levels in order to reduce delays and access to care.  

This will be supported through clinical transformation, use of digital innovation and collaborating across the partners in order to deliver sustainable changes that will benefit children, young people and their families for years to come.

Ruth Brown, Acting Chief Executive at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Children and young people have been severely impacted by the Covid 19 pandemic and the additional funding will help our clinical teams to see and treat more patients. We will work collaboratively with our partners to learn from each other and innovate to deliver lasting benefits for our patients.

“Giving children and young people support early on can prevent a lifetime of ill-health, so we are proud to be part of a scheme that not only helps families now, but also makes a difference to the health of the nation for decades to come.”

The programme will also help to support the wider recovery of NHS services across other specialist children’s centre’s in England who will be able to bid for strategic funding, with the support of the collaborative, to fast track elective recovery schemes in order to ensure that their children and young people get the care they need more quickly within their population.

The paediatric collaborative is one of the government’s 13 Accelerated Systems Programme’s that have been supported nationally and is made up of Alder Hey, Birmingham Children’s, Great Ormond Street, Manchester and Sheffield Children’s hospitals.  Each national programme will have access to up to £20m of upfront investment to enable delivery of proposed key interventions.

The programme will increase the volume of planned care significantly with each organisation achieving 120% of 2019/20 (pre-pandemic) activity levels in order to address the delays in treatment.