HEALTH regulators are so pleased with the progress Colchester’s hospitals have made they have postponed a progress meeting.

The troubleshooter brought in to improve Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust’s performance says his work is nearly done.

The independent regulator, Monitor, found the trust in “significant breach” of its foundation status last year after concerns about leadership, death rates and missing targets.

It sacked chairman Richard Bourne in November, and as part of its regulation, it ordered meetings every six weeks with hospital bosses.

But regulatory action has been relaxed because Monitor was so pleased with the progress the trust is making at its meeting last Tuesday.

At a directors’ meeting, trust chief executive Peter Murphy said Monitor had agreed to cancel its next meeting.

Mr Murphy said: “The report was pretty positive. They (Monitor) seem pleased with the work we are doing.”

He added the trust had been rated excellent across the board in a recent inspection of its environment, food, privacy and dignity standards.

“That’s a fantastic achievement and I think we need to congratulate our own staff and partner organisation,” he said.

“It’s a further endorsement that we are progressing at the pace and rate we should be.”

Sir Peter Dixon, who was drafted in as interim chairman to transform the trust, said he felt his work was nearly done.

It was hoped Sir Peter’s experience as chairman at London’s University College Hospital could help boost performance at Colchester General Hospital and Essex County Hospital. One of his first acts was to make hospital board meetings public. He said: “I happened to think that was the right thing to do.

“In Colchester, where there was an element of distrust, it was necessary to make that obvious gesture.

“There are still things we have to hold in private, but we should be prepared to have the performance data discussed and account for what we are doing in that way.”

He also sought to improve the trust’s performance in meeting key national targets.

He added: “The problem was we hadn’t been hitting those big picture targets in some areas for too long and instead of fixing things we argued about it and said ‘it’s not fair, it’s someone else’s fault’, where we should have been saying ‘this isn’t as good as it should be, we will fix that’.

By April, figures for the year showed more than 98 per cent of accident and emergency patients were seen within four hours and the trust recorded the best accident and emergency response in the East of England for 11 months of the year.

The trust has recently appointed four non-executive directors to its board and is trying to involve staff more in decisions after a disappointing response in its staff survey.

Sir Peter said: “People feel stressed, they don’t feel appreciated. We have to find ways of turning that round.

“We have tens of thousands of people coming through a hospital so you are bound to get some you don’t treat as well as you should.

“We need to talk about the good things so we can put pride back into the place – pride for the right reasons not being big headed.”

He is helping in the search for his replacement as well as a new chief executive to replace Mr Murphy, who retires in August.

He continued: “I have to find somebody who is going to be a lot better than me to take over.”