Beyond "Better Healthcare Closer to Home"
Though it was not specifically referred to at Health Scrutiny last night, the reality of BHCH is that Patricia Hewitt's comments in Parliament on 11 October are pretty explicit as repeated below:
"unfortunately the financial position in south london, in that part of the NHS, is worse than those involved believed it to be when they came up with a plan for a new hospital. It is, I am afraid, no longer clear that the proposal for a new critical care hospital and nine new community hospitals is affordable in the way that the local NHS originally planned it." (Hansard 11 October)
I think the implication is clear BHCH is dead as proposed from 2004 to 2005 and being totally consisitant on this issue, am actually pleased about this as it was a thoroughly unrealistic and top down acute led process.
Instead we are seeing the following:
1. A revenue led process, rather than capital led (ie buildings) approach to shift services to the community. In the PCT this is a comprehensive set of reforms. We still have much less detail on the acute side and the 200 bed cut out of 840 beds (23.8% of beds) has not been justified and Unison and the Health Scrutiny Committee are right to expres their concerns and in the latter case deamnd more info on what might be a "substantial variation" in service (Sally Brearley - Beddington South Lib Dem candidate and PCT Patients Forum) deserves plaudits for raising this.
2. A probable community hospital at Wallington based round ther Shotfield site assuming the PCT bid is accepted.
3 The Royal Marsden probably taking over much of the Sutton site (see previous posting).
Whilst we need vigilance and the Unison organised march on 25 November is important for keeping up the pressure to maximise service retention, the irony of the new process is that Sutton borough may effectively end up as a net gainer of NHS services at the end of the process as I will cover in a future posting, but we need to keep campaigning to that end. A very different way forward to the top-down BHCH approach!
This is why those in Sutton who accepted the original BHCH proposals in 2005 were actually selling the borough short to what we could now achieve.
"unfortunately the financial position in south london, in that part of the NHS, is worse than those involved believed it to be when they came up with a plan for a new hospital. It is, I am afraid, no longer clear that the proposal for a new critical care hospital and nine new community hospitals is affordable in the way that the local NHS originally planned it." (Hansard 11 October)
I think the implication is clear BHCH is dead as proposed from 2004 to 2005 and being totally consisitant on this issue, am actually pleased about this as it was a thoroughly unrealistic and top down acute led process.
Instead we are seeing the following:
1. A revenue led process, rather than capital led (ie buildings) approach to shift services to the community. In the PCT this is a comprehensive set of reforms. We still have much less detail on the acute side and the 200 bed cut out of 840 beds (23.8% of beds) has not been justified and Unison and the Health Scrutiny Committee are right to expres their concerns and in the latter case deamnd more info on what might be a "substantial variation" in service (Sally Brearley - Beddington South Lib Dem candidate and PCT Patients Forum) deserves plaudits for raising this.
2. A probable community hospital at Wallington based round ther Shotfield site assuming the PCT bid is accepted.
3 The Royal Marsden probably taking over much of the Sutton site (see previous posting).
Whilst we need vigilance and the Unison organised march on 25 November is important for keeping up the pressure to maximise service retention, the irony of the new process is that Sutton borough may effectively end up as a net gainer of NHS services at the end of the process as I will cover in a future posting, but we need to keep campaigning to that end. A very different way forward to the top-down BHCH approach!
This is why those in Sutton who accepted the original BHCH proposals in 2005 were actually selling the borough short to what we could now achieve.
posted by Charlie Mansell at 7:36 pm
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