I was at a meeting of the Audit & Governance committee at Hartlepool Borough Council on Friday afternoon with Lynn Pounder and Barry Chambers to hear representatives from the GP's Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), the NHS Trust and the National Clinical Advisory Team (NCAT) talk about their proposals to move 120 beds from Hartlepool hospital to North Tees hospital (see post dated 23 May 2013 for further details).
My primary concern from the meeting is that representatives from the groups named above could not even be open and honest about their reasons for proposing the further leaching of services from our hospital. Instead they concocted a tale about clinical safety stating that "the Trust is experiencing clinical problems of sustainability to keep abreast of escalating standards." The doctors apparently cannot continue to "carry on providing emergency medical and critical care services safely."
Further, they suggest that the current proposals are unavoidable because of the delay in the commissioning of the new hospital at Wynyard until 2017. They also claim that the critical care unit at Hartlepool is currently unsafe and that it is now desirable to create a larger acute medical unit at North Tees to allow for efficiencies of scale. Ironically they fail to mention that the prospect of a new hospital is hardly a certainty, and even appear to suggest that the critical mass of patients necessary to sustain the new venture cannot be guaranteed.
Surely if services cannot currently be defined as safe this must raise questions about the competency of the NHS Trust which has (mis)guided the hospital to its current predicament, despite the protests of the people of East Durham and Hartlepool. Ultimately though none if this is considered relevant by the NCAT in its proposals as they put forward only one recommendation - that beds and services continue to transfer from Hartlepool to North Tees whether or not the public consultation offers any contrary evidence. There is no alternative!
So much for local accountability and the meaning behind public consultation.
