Bed cuts all about cash

Published: 17 December, 2010

• CRITICISING Shirley Scott-Norton and Peter Jones for the clear failings of Islington Borough User Group (iBUG) seems to be aiming at the wrong target (Letters, December 10). 

All they are doing is protecting their own positions by supporting the plans of NHS Camden and Islington and Camden NHS Foundation Trust, which is proposing to close two psychiatric hospitals with the loss of more than 100 beds. What else could they do?

Similarly, although Richard Arthur chairs the foundation trust, he is not responsible for these plans. His part-time post is very much as a figurehead.  

The proposals were put forward by the trust’s medical director, Sylva Tang. She claims that these proposals to reduce the trust’s bed base by a third are necessary and safe and are made solely on clinical grounds.  

It is hard to understand this when the same organisation has to regularly send patients to other areas, often to private hospitals, to receive treatment. 

The same trust claims that these cuts will help it save some £20million over the next three years, savings which it says it must make, although it has failed to produce any clear evidence of this.

The trust is required to consult on these proposals. Close inspection of the facts and figures seems to lead to the conclusion that these proposed cuts have very little to do with better patient care and everything to do with saving money.

In the interest of patients, people would do well to ignore the iBUG advice and oppose the cuts in the strongest possible terms.

DANNY BLOOM
Tollington Park Road, N4

• RECENT letters make it clear there are problems at iBUG right now. This is doubly unfortunate – patients desperately need an organisation to advise them and defend services at a time when the Coalition government is making such savage cuts. The management of iBUG seems more closely allied with service providers than with service users. 

Isn’t this inevitable when Peter Jones and Shirley Scott-Norton are the first points of call for Islington Council, NHS Islington and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust and have been for nearly 10 years? In every situation familiarity breeds content.

If iBUG’s claims to be the patients’ watchdog and not the poodle of the authorities are to be believed then it needs to be an organisation which patients can believe in. The only way this can happen is if it replaces the present board with people who will oppose cuts and stand up for the rights of users of mental health services. 

Anything else is a betrayal and leads to questions about why the group exists and is funded by Islington’s council tax-payers.

E HOPE
Corsica Street, N5