Interview: Epsom and St Helier Hospital chief executive Matthew Hopkins talks NHS troubles

In a frank interview in his Epsom Hospital office, Matthew Hopkins, who was a Macmillan nurse for five years, said: "I think the move towards better coordinated care for patients is absolutely the right direction of travel.

"So if that’s what we are all trying to achieve across the NHS and health and social care then that’s exactly the right thing to do.

"I don’t think you need to structurally change the NHS every four or five years to achieve that goal.

"I think you need to get people focused on the common goal of making a difference to patients and that being the first item on every meeting agenda. So that’s my view without being too political."

St Helier Hospital

When asked about why he joined the NHS Mr Hopkins said: "My reason for choosing the NHS was a personal story - my family had quite a bad experience of the NHS in the 1970s.

"My mother had breast cancer and she had a mastectomy. The rules in those days in that hospital were that close relatives weren’t allowed to visit until seven days afterwards.

"My sense was that was fundamentally wrong. There wasn’t enough care particularly for the family unit and husbands in the context of massive traumatic surgery affecting a woman and all that comes with that.

“Only recently at my mum’s 75th birthday party all the family were together there were very few people who weren’t using or accessing the NHS for various reasons – we had a new born baby and my mother on dialysis.

“Often in their area of the country - as they are all dotted around - there has been some kind of recent turbulence.

“But that aside there’s a real sense of valuing their local health services which validates my decision in 1982 to start up a career in the NHS.”

Mr Hopkins, who has been in his post for two-and-a-half years, is faced with the Better Services Better Value healthcare review that threaten his hospitals' A&E, maternity and paediatric departments, however his stance of "business as usual" has been clear throughout.

When asked if the controversial review should be canned he said: "If we get to unfortunate position where we can’t press forward with BSBV it leaves my organisation in a more challenging position as we’d need to know what the commissioners' plans would be, how they would impact our clinical and financial sustainability and what that might mean for our route to financial trust status."

He admitted the board thinks if Epsom and St Helier are chosen as the hospitals to be downgraded, they are unlikely to be big enough or financially sustainable enough to make a credible financial trust application and would need to look for a partner to merge with.

Mr Hopkins did reveal he thought the recent High Court decision to throw out Government plans to downgrade Lewisham Hospital was important and said: “Firstly the financial analysis assumes the changes to Lewisham were going ahead and that will need to be re-looked at pending any appeal from the Department of Health about the High Court’s decision.

“And then the second question is about the Secretary of State’s four tests for service change – one of them being GPs support. In the Lewisham case the CCGs weren’t supporting and therefore weren’t supporting proposals.

“The important thing in service reconfiguration in the modern NHS now is to understand the position of the GPs in relation to that change – that will be something that will be important as we move forward with these plans – how the GPs view these plans.”