The woman in charge of Cumbria’s cottage hospitals has offered a glimmer of hope to campaigners fighting to save their beds.

Claire Molloy, chief executive of the Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, has hinted that she would like to find a compromise.

Currently meeting with groups connected to all of the community hospitals, the aim is to explore alternative plans drawn up by local groups. It comes after the Government’s Success Regime set out its preferred options for the future of healthcare in north and west Cumbria.

The controversial plans include closing all beds in three of the area’s community hospitals and reducing the total number from 133 to 104 – consolidated across the remaining hospitals.

Those earmarked for closure are in Wigton, Maryport and Alston. Although the hospitals would remain open, it would be without inpatient beds. Instead the buildings would become hubs for community care, looking after more people in their own homes, and hosting clinics.

The proposals have been met with huge opposition, with hundreds backing our Save Our Services campaign which aims to fight the cottage hospital bed closures and other radical service cuts.

But despite being involved in drawing up the Success Regime’s ‘Healthcare for the Future’ consultation document, Mrs Molloy has now given community hospitals campaigners a glimmer of hope. She said she is ready to work with League of Friends groups across the area to see if a compromise can be found.

Mrs Molloy, who will meet the Penrith group tonight, said it was not a PR stunt but a real attempt to find solutions.

Asked if she thought there was the chance that beds could be retained in all of the areas, she said: “I do think that if you are doing genuine consultation then there has to be a possibility.”

However Mrs Molloy also stressed that there were genuine problems with the existing set up, particularly in staffing small inpatient units.

She said the plan put forward aims to tackle that by creating bigger units, with 16 beds or more, so safe staffing ratios of one qualified nurse per eight patients can be met and there is adequate cover when staff are on leave, or need time off due to sickness or bereavement.

They also don’t think there will be a need for 133 beds in future, so keeping beds at all the hospitals would mean even smaller units.


Related: Success Regime's plans for health services in Cumbria


However Mrs Molloy agreed that the three communities currently set to lose their beds would not have necessarily been selected if those hospital buildings were in better condition. Yet she said that they have had to look at whether they could be altered to take extra beds.

“If you were starting from scratch you wouldn’t necessarily end up with that (distribution of beds),” she said.

“I think that is an issue we want to address during the consultation – geographic placing of these units and the population needs.

“Each of the three communities have a set of challenges. In Alston it is geographic isolation, Wigton there are issues around not having beds in quite a big geographic area, and in Maryport it’s a very deprived community with high levels of ill health.”

Mrs Molloy said they have tried to ensure there is some provision of beds in each of the districts when drawing up the options, and said at present there are five hospitals in the Allerdale area.

In terms of solution she said it may be possible to create a “different type of bed”, merging health and social care needs – a model supported by many League of Friends campaigners.