I have been a sunny, happy person of late and it has been difficult to raise my ire (no, that’s not a euphemism).
But that can always be changed by our favourite government. Today the secondary, primary, tertiary, third-stage, long-winded, nobody-will-listen-to-it-anyway consultation was started (see the Keep Worthing and Southlands Hospitals campaign website for details). The proposals as they stand will cost lives.
People will die.
Some child, elderly person, or unlikely middle-aged person will suffer an injury (58,000 attended Worthing’s A&E last year) and they’ll be just too far, or stuck in the traffic jam for just too long and they’ll die. People will grieve, people will be angry, but that person will remain dead and, shockingly, it will be spun by our government as the price of ‘reform’.
In a nutshell, Haywards Heath’s hospital (the Princess Royal) will close. That will mean the nearest hospital with accident and emergency facilities will be Worthing, Brighton or Redhill depending on the location of the injured and upon the next decision the Primary Care Trust will make; which of Worthing or Chichester will lose their A&E.
If we assume that it is Worthing and the Princess Royal that close that means that approximately half the 58,000 people who attended Worthing will now go to Brighton. I don’t know how many attended the Princess Royal, but if we assume it was only 25,000 (as the figures do not appear to be separated for the Sussex County (in Brighton) and the Princess Royal because they’re in the same NHS Trust). That means 41,500 more people visiting Brighton’s already-overstretched Accident and Emergency every year. That’s nearly 800 more people per week; who won’t, incidentally, be fitting neatly into the low-demand periods of time.
So A&E in Brighton will be overstretched, people without private transport (and even some with) will consider not making the journey, and some won’t make the journey: Three cheerful ways to die because this government has not forced PCTs to manage their finances better despite extraordinary amounts of extra ‘investment’.
I feel sick; So should Patricia Hewitt, West Sussex PCT and Tony Blair/Gordon Brown.
I feel sick.
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#1 by Grendel on June 21st, 2007 - 9:52 pm
Gavin,
That’s only part of the story.
At the staff meetings held at Worthing and Southlands sites yesterday (urgently called due to the fact that the BBC had obtained details of the consultation and were about to broadcast!) the local plans under the banner of I.H.S. (Improving Hospital Services) were also outlined as well as the general details of the Settings of Care / FFTF.
Over the next six months it is planned that most of the clinical services currently based at Southlands are to be moved to Worthing Hospital. £8M has been / will be supplied by the DoH to facilitate the move. The Trust board have indicated that this expenditure will be recovered over a period of two year due to the efficiencies of having more services delivered from one site. Another element of the saving is also supposed to come from the PCT being better able to manage demand – How this is supposed to work I am not quite sure – perhaps the DoH have provided new guidelines as to what it is to be classified as ill.
There is a view that this is an attempt at a pre-emptive strike to get WaSH ahead in the race to be the Major District Hospital for West Sussex. Remember one of the criteria for being designated as such is achieving financial balance.
The practical upshot of I.H.S will be the closure of 50 beds and the loss (by whatever means) of about 140 jobs.
It seems pretty obvious that the PCT are playing a game of divide and rule. The CEO’s will start by trying to point up the benefits of their own organisation being designated the County ‘s major hospital – but by doing that it is implicit that you are denigrating the opposition and we will probably end up fighting like ferrets in a sack.
G