Rejected: no-brainer solution to health centre future

Published: 20 August, 2010

• I WOULD like to congratulate Andrew Da Silva on his pertinent letter about Finsbury Health Centre (My challenge to people in power: show that you care, August 13). But I would like to address his “challenge” to “politicians and people in authority” to “show that they care”. I chair Islington Council’s health and wellbeing committee, which has spent the last year scrutinising the Primary Care Trust’s (PCT) proposed closure of the health centre.  

The committee has produced a factual and evidence-based report that reaches two main conclusions: first, that the health centre should be retained because of the healthcare benefits of its location and its ability to deliver the polyclinic-style services already on the site, and, second, that, while a commercially-based restoration and refit of the building would cost quite a bit of money (although a bit more than half what the PCT claims), a charitable trust, heritage-based restoration would attract funding from donors and heritage sources not only nationally but internationally, which would enable the PCT (or whoever takes over ownership of the building under the government’s reforms) to get the building restored very cheaply, if not for free.

It is my view, and the view of colleagues on the committee and council, that to keep and restore the health centre, exploiting its international reputation to source funding, should be a “no-brainer” for the PCT. Even more so in these difficult financial times, when the PCT has admitted it could not afford to build anything new in the south of the borough if it wanted to. Last month, I formally presented the committee’s report to the PCT board, and in spite of the current climate it rejected the  findings, or at least the chair said it did without asking the board to vote on it. The committee will consider, at its next meeting at the town hall at 7.30pm on September 2, whether to refer the PCT’s refusal to accept the findings to the Minister. I hope this convinces Mr Da Silva that local politicians do care. We are doing all we can.

CLLR MARTIN KLUTE
Labour chair, health and wellbeing scrutiny committee, Islington Council