‘Community’ hospitals on the way out
Whatever relief we feel at the news that the number of general medical beds in Seaton Hospital will increase must surely be tempered by the fact that the clumsily named NEW (Northern, Eastern and Western) Devon Clinical Commissioning Group, doesn’t even get the idea of community hospitals.
A NEW Devon spokesman, writing in this week’s View From, says that they have to take account of the ‘whole population’ of the area, not just specific ‘communities’. Community opinion in Axminster (and Ottery St. Mary, which will also lose its beds) has simply been set aside.
EDDC’s Scrutiny Committee, chaired for the first time in years by a non-Conservative (Independent, Roger Giles), has asked both MPs to request the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, to overrule the decision to remove the beds from the two hospitals. Our MP, Neil Parish has already said he will do this for Axminster. I wish him well with this but I’m not holding my breath.
Parish says that ‘Our Government’s NHS legislation puts much store on local people being consulted and listened to’. However the Lansley reorganisation was universally criticised for creating a fiendishly complex structure which would make it more difficult for people to influence. And so it has proved.
Seaton Hospital – beds safe for now. But for how long?
Seaton & Colyton MATTERS 