What will cuts leave?

Published: 24th June, 2011

• FOLLOWING the example of the Cameron government on the NHS, the local mental health trust has been engaged in a “discussion” on its plans to sell off St Luke’s Hospital, the oldest and most welcoming of its in-patient sites. 

No doubt Camden and Islington Foundation Trust will claim that it is a “listening organisation”. Why then has it failed to listen to the request of Camden and Islington Joint Health Scrutiny Committees that it should hold a full three-month consultation on this issue? 

It seems that the unelected board of directors of this organisation, under the chair of Richard Arthur, a former Labour leader of Camden Council, are happy to thwart the wishes of the local elected representatives. This is a very bad omen.

In the past few months, the foundation trust has held a three-month consultation on the future of its in-patient hospitals and decided, against opposition, that it should close the Grove Centre at the Royal Free Hospital and St Mary’s House in Hampstead, with the loss of nearly 100 beds.  

It decided not to include St Luke’s in this consultation, presumably because it would look like “a cut too far”. The same trust has recently announced that it is cutting its community provision by 40 per cent, and held no consultation or discussion on this and seems not to have published any information. Now it is rushing to rid itself of St Luke’s.  

It has emerged that the trust wishes to have only one in-patient site, Highgate Mental Health Centre in Dartmouth Park Hill, and it is proposing to extend it, though it is unclear how.

Correspondents have noted that the local patients’ group iBUG has failed to raise its voice against these massive cuts and commented that this is consistent with its silence over the term of its life. 

The question is really: what is the council doing funding a patients’ group which never does anything for patients? The more important question is: what mental health services will be left after all these cuts and will they meet the needs of vulnerable people in Islington and Camden?

Perhaps the increasingly strong rumour that there will be a merger with Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust, revisiting the proposals in 2000 for a five-borough trust, is the ultimate aim. 

The question here is: when will the public and service users be told?
D West
Oakfield Road, N4

• CARLTON Traynor seems to believe that once you have a mental health problem you are capable of very little in the way of normal life (Cuts: the real villains, June 17). If the figure of one in four people suffering a mental health problem is correct then we had better hope he is seriously mistaken or a quarter of the population will be effectively useless because they experience some mental illness.

What he says about Islington Borough User Group (iBUG) may well be true and the organisation would seem to do more harm than good to the cause. However, it is a small group and it is unfair of him to extend his criticism to the wider population.  

No doubt we all do the best we can, but that does not reduce us all to a life of unemployment, living on state handouts. Many of us can and do make valuable contributions and pay our taxes.
Lynton McAndrew
Hanley Road, N4