Rotherham Hospital's former bosses hit back at criticism

Mr James, the former chief executive of the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, called comments by Mike Morgan, the American brought in as head of a turnaround team at the hospital, “inaccurate”.

He also accused Mr Morgan of being “disingenuous” when he blamed blamed weak governance, a failure to change methods of allocating funding and the introduction of a new electronic records system for the hospital’s current position in comments to the Advertiser last week.

And Mr James has been backed by past trust chairman Margaret Oldfield OBE, who described Mr Morgan’s comments as “inaccurate” and “misleading”.

Mr Morgan told the Advertiser last week that the hospital had been losing £300,000 a month for the past two years, but had now posted a £400,000 surplus over the past month.

More nurses were being hired while corporate staff numbers were being cut.

But in a letter to this week’s Advertiser, Mr James, who retired last year, said: “His claims that he and his team reversed two-years’ worth of £300,000 per month losses (which by the way is just 1.5 per cent of the annual budget) and had generated surpluses of £400,000 by March 2013, when he had only been in post three months, are manifestly ridiculous.

“The financial turnaround was well in hand and on track before I left the trust in November 2012.”

And he claimed that Mr Morgan’s target of £50m savings was unachievable within the existing model of care.

And Mrs Oldfield, also in a letter to this week’s Advertiser, echoed his comments.

She said the previous managment had placed Rotherham Hospital among the top 40 in the country and given it a nationally-recognised reputation.

But she adds: “Under the current leadership and management that reputation has been damaged beyond recognition.”

You can read the full text of both letters in this week’s Advertiser.

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