Yet
another reorganisation in the National Health Service today
has highlighted the changing nature of healthcare provision.
Similarly,
a recent meeting of the Parliamentary All Party Local Hospitals
Group, chaired by Peter Viggers at the House of Commons,
re-emphasised the continuing and indeed growing importance
of local hospitals.
The
Parliamentary meeting was addressed by Professor Sir George
Alberti, the National Director for Emergency Access, and
Dr. David Colin-Thome, the National Clinical Director of
Primary Care. These two leading doctors have been named "Tsars" of
hospital provision responsible direct to Ministers. Sir
George Alberti emphasised that most people wanted treatment
as close to home as possible or even in their home and
with the new ways of working and the advances in care a
great deal of work previously done in hospital could now
be done in community settings.
For
urgent care, there must be a network involving the main
local acute hospital with its accident and emergency department
and related hospitals whether they are community hospitals
or smaller acute hospitals with urgent care centres. These
should be run in conjunction with the nearest accident
and emergency department with shared staff rotating between
the different branches of the one area emergency service.
He also stressed that some emergencies could be managed
in their own homes by emergency care practitioners as a
part of local rapid response teams.
How
does this affect Haslar Hospital?
The
hospital continues to provide essential medical services
and will continue to be needed after 31 March 2007 when
the Ministry of Defence is determined to withdraw its support.
There will then be a period of at least two years during
which Queen Alexandra Hospital at Cosham will be under
reconstruction. Haslar will be needed to provide services
which cannot be provided at Cosham while Queen Alexandra
Hospital is a building site.
The
question is what happens after 2009? Local people are adamant
that they wish Haslar to continue and current medical thinking
seems to be moving towards providing the maximum of appropriate
medical care in local communities leaving District General
Hospitals and large Regional Centres to undertake acute
care that needs access to many specialities.
Peter
Viggers commented today: "The strategic
planning in South Hampshire has been built on the premise
that medical care in the future will be able to deal more
briskly with surgical operations and the planning is therefore
for less beds than at present. I take the opposite view.
I believe that medical techniques are developing to such
an extent that there will be more operations and that the
need for beds is likely to increase rather than diminish.
On top of that, there is an increasing awareness that the
MRSA bug in hospitals demands greater standards of cleanliness
and perhaps less concentrated use of facilities. Also,
in recent weeks we have seen hundreds of redundancies amongst
hospital staff at Southampton and elsewhere and, of course,
the closure of King Edward VII hospital at Midhurst has
thrown more pressure upon existing facilities.
The
Haslar Task Force continues to reflect the absolute local
determination that Haslar will continue in the longer term.
We very much welcome the fct that Ursula Ward, the Chief
Executive of Portsmouth Hospital Trust has agreed to meet
us in Gosport on Friday to discuss this issue."
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