FORUM: Loss of Finsbury Health Centre would end an era

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Published: 27 August, 2010

ANOTHER day of decision nears in the long battle to save pioneering Finsbury Health Centre. Meg Howarth and Barb Jacobson warn that its closure would be an act of cultural barbarism and the betrayal of a proud tradition

On Thursday, members of Islington Council’s health and wellbeing committee have a vital decision to make.

They could honour the committee’s report supporting the refurbishment of Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre and the committee’s pre-election decision to refer primary care trust NHS Islington’s rejection of the renovation to an independent body in the Department of Health.

Or they could adopt a wait-and-see approach in the vague hope that some good will come of the proposed Con-Lib Dem government health reforms.

From 2002 until November 2007, the primary care trust (PCT) publicly supported refurbishment of the much-loved, grade I-listed centre while allowing its fabric to continue to deteriorate.

Even its own three-year feasibility study supported refurbishment.

Then in March 2008, it issued a news release: “The PCT has now decided that the costs of [refurbishment] are just too high” and “to relocate the services based at Finsbury Health Centre”. 

According to its then chief executive, “money could be much better spent on providing and improving healthcare services for local people” than on refurbishment of the much-loved, purpose-built health facility.

The next year she accepted a pay rise, from £145,000 to £155,000.

The “local people” in whose interests this decision was allegedly made were never consulted – not even by the well-paid non-executives who, according to the PCT, have the responsibility to “ensure the voice of local people is heard at the decision-making level of NHS Islington”.

Actions speak louder than words, of course. Since the health bosses’ claim that refurbishment would be too expensive was discredited by the council committee report, the goalposts have been shifted – from costs to “space requirements” for a new polyclinic in the south of the borough.

Asked to account for the 3.500m2 they assert is needed, the bosses’ hotchpotch of an answer – “the figure of 3.500m2 is drawn from a mixture [of sources]” – reads more like a hasty attempt to justify closure than a sound case for relocation.

So what really lies behind the determination of the PCT to close Britain’s first, still-functioning polyclinic, which offered free healthcare a full ten years before the founding of the NHS? As a grade I-listed building, the health centre cannot be demolished, but emptied of its purpose and acquired cheaply because of its state of disrepair it would make an outstanding vanity project for one who knows its architectural and historical worth, particularly against the background of the “development” plans for Clerkenwell.

What an easy way for PCT bosses to rid themselves of a building they clearly find a nuisance.

Alderman Harold Riley and Dr Chuni Katial, respectively leader of the then borough of Finsbury and chairman of its public health committee, who commissioned the Tecton partnership to design and build the health centre, had a vision, one shared by architect Lubetkin.

At the opening of this pioneering, socially inspired centre on October 21, 1938, Dr Katial spoke simply: “[It] marks... the dawn of a new era in public health service.” 

That era is now under threat, not least from NHS Islington itself with its scrapping of not-for-profit Camidoc out-of-hours GP service in favour of private company Harmoni.

Who can forget that the out-of-hours doctor responsible for the death of a patient through overprescription of morphine in Cambridge was recruited by a private health firm employed by the local PCT? What a long way we’ve moved from the values that inspired Dr Katial and his colleagues. 

Ending the use of the building as a health centre would not only be an act of cultural barbarism but a betrayal of Finsbury’s proud social history and of the people of Islington who, to the present day, continue to love and value this milestone in Britain’s medical care.

It’s up to us to ensure this doesn’t happen.

• Meg Howarth and Barb Jacobson are members of the Save Finsbury Health Centre campaign