Jason McCartney: Huddersfield patients pay price of A&E closure threat

The CCG’s preferred option is to close Huddersfield Royal Infirmary’s A&E and keep the provision at Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax. The background to this proposal is the ruinous Private Finance Initiative deal signed in 1998. The initial cost of Calderdale Royal Hospital was £64.6m but it will end up costing the Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust an incredible £773.2m when the deal expires in 2058. This PFI is now influencing clinical and community health decisions to an enormously detrimental effect.

Throughout the last 12 months when our local CCGs were mooting a reorganisation and reconfiguration of emergency and acute care and high risk planned care, it was the HRI that was the preferred location. It was only when the PFI financial considerations were factored in that suddenly the appalling proposition of closing A&E at Huddersfield emerged.

I was shocked at this proposal. So was our community. I live in the village of Honley, a few miles outside of Huddersfield. I have used A&E at the HRI a number of times where I have received excellent care; in 1995 I fell seriously ill on my return from deployment in Turkey and northern Iraq while serving in the RAF and 18 months ago I fractured my elbow while running the Honley 10K race.

Our community has come together to fight to keep our A&E at HRI. Karl Deitch set up a Facebook group which now has over 46,000 members, a similar number have signed a Parliamentary petition and a big march is planned starting from St George’s Square at 11.30am on February 27. This campaign to save our A&E is by far and away the biggest local issue I have dealt with as the MP for Colne Valley. There are posters everywhere, volunteers taking petitions from door to door and the “Hands off HRI” hashtag being projected onto public buildings.

HRI is in my Colne Valley constituency, which also includes the western side of Huddersfield, Colne Valley itself and Holme Valley. It means that if any of my 81,000 constituents or their children need to go to A&E they will have to pass HRI before undertaking the congested trek over to Halifax. My constituents have been sending me sat-nav reports of their journeys from Huddersfield to Halifax – some took up to 45 minutes. It is extremely congested due to bad weather, floods, damaged bridges and expanding housing developments.

My constituents at the top of the valleys in Holme or Marsden could face an hour’s journey. Already patients there are going to Oldham and Barnsley.

This proposal is coming from the CCG, a panel of local doctors. I remember the faceless bureaucrats of the old PCT who downgraded maternity services at HRI in 2008. I believe healthcare professionals will in the end make the right decisions. We need to make sure that the voices of all our local doctors are heard, not just those on the CCG. A local GP from Colne Valley says care for patients in Kirklees & Calderdale should not be driven by PFI.

Huddersfield is a growing, vibrant university town. If this appalling proposal goes ahead, we would be the largest town in our country not to have an A&E within five miles. Huddersfield has a population of 146,000. We have over 20,000 students at our award-winning university and I have already had an email from a father whose son is now not going to apply for fear of not having a local A&E.

This proposal would cost £490m as it would see HRI knocked down and replaced by a much smaller hospital on an adjacent site. Surely this financial injection, if secured, would make better sense to invest in A&E in both Halifax and Huddersfield?

I have joined other local MPs of all parties in requesting a meeting with the Health Secretary and we’ll continue to explore ways to revisit the PFI. However it is our community who will have their say as the consultation begins. We will bombard the CCG with facts, figures and logical reasoning why these decisions should be based on saving more lives, improving experiences and delivering better outcomes – not short term financial implications.

Patient safety must come first, that means keeping our A&E in Huddersfield. The message is loud and clear – Hands off our HRI!

Jason McCartney is the Conservative MP for Colne Valley.