Hospital bosses working to provide more care outside of hospital following transport concerns

United Lincolnshire Teaching Hospitals Trust (ULTH) said it is committed to providing more care in the community after some councillors raised concerns about the lack of public transport in rural parts of Lincolnshire.

Members of Lincolnshire County Council’s health scrutiny committee heard that some patients are facing delays or even missing appointments because of the lack of public transport in rural areas.

Coun Charmaine Morgan (Independent), who sits on South Kesteven District Council, spoke at the meeting on Wednesday, November 19. She questioned what the hospital trust is doing to help patients access out of hours appointments.

The councillor, who represents the Grantham St Vincents ward, said: “What are we doing overall to reduce that and we know it is a county-wide issue, particularly because it’s affecting our lower-income areas the worst?

“What are we putting in place specifically to target that – and patient transport comes into this big time.

“I just wondered how we’re working with the transport providers? The other issue links to out of hours.

“Where somebody may have an emergency, we’re finding people can’t get to A&E at night for example. There’s no transport provision.

“So I’m just wondering what we’re doing to support people out of hours?”

Caroline Landon, group chief operating officer at the Lincolnshire Community and Hospitals NHS Group, said: “Our absolute focus is moving care out of the hospital and into the community.”

He added: “We’re absolutely committed to ensuring patients don’t need to travel to our buildings, because in this day and age, they shouldn’t have to.

“We should be taking services to their door, regardless of what that service is, but particularly if it’s cancer services and provisioning outreach services.”

Ms Landon went on to say that ULTH is working to expand its CDCs (Community Diagnostic Centres) – which can handle tests, checks and scans – and on plans to provide more care outside of its hospitals and closer to its patients.

She added: “If you need a diagnostic, you come to one of our CDCs but there’s also something building about mobile diagnostics which we’re looking at, but also empowering GPs and sending people into primary care to actually do that and provisioning equipment to do that.

“It’s an integral part of our strategy – not for five years, not for 10 years but for the next three years. We’re in year one of doing that.

“We’re nowhere near where we need to be this year, but next year we have plans in place, working with our GP colleagues to do exactly what you’re asking, which is to take care out to our residents and to absolutely maximise the use of our CDCs, putting them in areas which are easy for people to go to.”

Coun Lucille Hagues (Conservative), who sits on North Kesteven District Council, also questioned what the trust is doing to ensure that patients’ symptoms are not misdiagnosed.

The councillor, who represents the Navenby and Brant Broughton ward, said: “What happens to cancer patients when they go to the GP and they’re missed as something else?

“How do you pick that up? Do they end up going to A&E or what happens?”

Louise Jeanes, programme leader for cancer at the Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board, said: “I think there’s a number of routes that they can take. They can go back to their GP a number of times with differing symptoms or they can end up in our A&E departments through an emergency pathway.

“Until we have the right referral, we often don’t know about those patients. That’s really difficult.

“For me, there’s some education to our population, to understand if we access our screening and we will have four screening programmes up in 2026.

“We also have the NSF pathway – which is the non-specific symptoms pathway – which allows a GP to refer patients who have vague symptoms of cancer that do not specifically meet the needs of a pathway. That pathway is available to all GPs in Lincolnshire.”