Put people’s health needs above plans for palace

Published: 25 November, 2010

• COULD the 69-people convalescent home and dementia hospital at Athlone House, Hampstead Heath, be a dividing line between the Labour government’s welfare programme of 1945 and provision for the many in need, and the Thatcher roll-back policy of 1979, its “bargain sales” of public assets and profit from them which enables individuals to become rich enough to change an Athlone House into palace’s fit for a Queen of Sheba?

Richard Murphy (Forum, November 4) showed how £120billion is filched from taxation and that redundancy of taxation staff will compound this problem for the public, while increasing the rake-off for profiteers. So the future for Tom Costello, moved 200 miles from his Somers Town home while beds remain empty in local hospitals, is certain to become more the case in the future.

Emptying hospital beds to claim they are surplus to requirements, which enables NHS bureaucrats to comply with government policy for closure of hospitals, is illustrated in Whittington Hospital’s 2008/9 report which said “average length of stay (not treatment note!) has decreased by over two days to an average of four days”. 

To achieve this, as people with a patient in hospital will confirm, requires constant goading by management on nurses and doctors to empty beds and, horror of horrors, prevent bed-blocking.

This policy afflicts as a plague patients and their carers. So much so has this become a complaint that care in the community, as the recent House of Commons select committee report (March 2010) said, needs “fundamental reform... to create a lasting solution”.

This could start by removing “average length of stay (treatment)” from hospital practice. Then introduce recovery hospitals for patients not well enough to return home and convalescent homes for those still in need of treatment. 

We could help this process along by supporting Camden Council’s rejection of the attempt by owners of Athlone House to convert it to a palace.

It is now too late to write to the planning inspector. But could not the council ask general citizens of Camden to vote their approval by the local press carrying a voting form to be emailed or posted to some neutral scrutiniser for counting? Though “informal” it could show the inspector at the planning inquiry to be held in February 2011, and any appeal to the minister, the number of people they have won to their cause?

ALAN SPENCE
Bury Place Residents’ Association, WC1