This week I have been working with our medical correspondent Stephen Adams on an investigation into A&E, maternity, paediatric and other ward closures in the NHS.
We analysed every English trust (Scotland and Wales have separate NHS systems) and checked out services for acute care across the board.
The findings are quite shocking. More than twenty A&E wards are threatened with closure or have already closed, and only a slightly smaller number of maternity wards have either closed or may do so when proposals by trusts are completed.
In addition, paediatric heart surgery has been scaled back from ten centres to seven. Centres of excellence like the Royal Brompton in London will no longer be saving children’s lives as the NHS is streamlined and savings are made.
These are called ‘public consultations’, but did we, the British public, really know this was happening to our health service on such a scale?
There is a genuine debate over whether reorganisation of services into larger units with more doctors can benefit patient care – but travel times are a real factor.
A&E and maternity units are services that people can’t hang around for, in the cases of heart attack and stroke victims or mothers giving birth, for example. And with tens more miles to travel, the guarantee of better care at the end of the journey may not be of comfort while patients are in transit.
London is particularly affected by the shakeup, though Manchester has seen many of these changes already to a largely positive response.
Better care, further away, or closer but patchier provision? It would be ideal if the British public didn’t have to choose between the two.
