Greg Mulholland: NHS arrogance and empty words over hospital ward that should not be shut

OTLEY, the home of the multi-million pound Wharfedale Hospital, witnessed a well attended public meeting this week with angry residents berating health managers regarding the closure of Ward 1.

The community Support Wharfedale Hospital campaign was doing something that local NHS bosses have failed to do: giving local people a say over their hospital.

While the main focus of people’s anger was the decision to close the ward and concern for the future of care for older people in the area, there was also uproar at the scant regard that the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) has given to the opinions within the local community that Wharfedale serves.

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It emerged at the meeting that not only had local people, the local MP, the Leeds councillors and Otley Town Council not been consulted at all, but nor had the areas’s GPs, who clearly have a key role in this decision and in the provision of care for older people.

That is a totally unacceptable way to make such an important decision.

In 2007, the Trust was forced to issue a public apology for failing to consult local residents about the closure of a previous elderly care ward at Wharfedale. Sadly, it is truly a case of déjà vu.

The controversy was reported by the Yorkshire Post on January 30, 2007, when a LTHT spokesman was quoted as saying: “We acknowledge we should have done more to engage local people in the decision to close Ward 1 and have apologised for this.”

What empty words they have turned out to be.

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Four years later, we are back in exactly the same situation with the Trust again failing to engage with local residents before making decisions that have a real impact on their lives.

There is no excuse for this; it is an insult to local people and a clear reneging on assurances that the Trust would never make a decision in this way again. The Trust was right to issue an apology in 2007. Now they must do so again.

What all this showed is a complete lack of accountability in the NHS. As I have had to remind health managers, it is not their health service. It is the people’s. Yet that message continues to fall on deaf ears.

It also shows the absurdity of a system where the overall commissioning body, the Primary Care Trust, NHS Leeds, claim they have no responsibility for commissioning to Wharfedale, only to commission on a “serviced model”. In other words, they can, and do, commission services to other places that undermine this superb facility. This is no way to run a health service.

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So what to do if we don’t like it? Complain to the third level of NHS managerial hierarchy, the regional Strategic Health Authority? They showed in 2007 that they are as much use as a chocolate teapot, when all they did was rubberstamp the decision taken locally, despite the disgraceful way it was taken and the effect on local services.

A white elephant organisation, introduced simply to do the bidding of previous Secretaries of State, SHAs do nothing to improve NHS accountability to the people who need it most, those who use and rely on services at a local level. Their abolition cannot come soon enough.

So anyone saying that all is well in the NHS is quite wrong. There is concern about the efficiency savings imposed on the NHS by the previous Labour Government, cuts that have led to many tough decisions. But this episode also shows that despite tough financial times, and despite the current Government’s commitment to both ring-fence the NHS and increase spending over the course of parliament, there are wider issues to be dealt with.

We need a more locally accountable NHS with fewer tiers of management. Whether the now (thankfully) significantly revised Health and Social Care bill will address these issues is a question we must now all ask.

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This opportunity for reform cannot be passed by without giving significant new opportunities for local people to influence the direction of health services in their area.

For now, it remains for local elected representatives and community organisations like the Support Wharfedale Hospital Campaign to hold NHS managers to account.

So the meeting and the Campaign resolved to do three things – to demand an apology for the way the decision was taken, with no public consultation, in clear breach of the previous commitment; to call for the suspension of the closure, to consult, and to derive a plan for the use of the ward; and to get NHS Leeds, as the current commissioning body, to a subsequent meeting so as to work with them on the plan, pushing for Ward 1 to be an intermediate care ward for older people.

For the public, I ask that they hold health managers to account, express their opposition to the closure, and support Wharfedale Hospital by signing the petition at www.supportwharfedalehospital.co.uk.

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We need to ensure that the hospital continues to serve local people as a genuine community hospital which is what people campaigned for and what they were promised. It is clearly down to the community and their representatives to hold those who run the NHS, both locally and nationally, to that promise.

Greg Mulholland is the Liberal Democrat MP for Leeds North West, and founder of the Support Wharfedale Hospital campaign.

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