Emergency meeting to save Whittington Hospital’s A&E

Published: 28 January 2010
by TOM FOOT

HUNDREDS of patients have demanded the Whittington Hospital accident and emergency department be spared after details of the funding ­crisis facing Camden hospitals were revealed in a packed public meeting on Tuesday night.
NHS top brass faced dozens of questions from around 350 people in the Archway Methodist Hall over proposals to shut the Highgate hospital’s casualty department and send tens of thousands of patients to the Royal Free in Hampstead.
Rachel Tyndall, the £140,000-a-year NHS Islington chief executive tasked with deciding which NHS services are axed, said: “You want to call this cuts – I’m fine with that. I’m not scared to say cuts. If we take out the A&E it will fundamentally change the hospital. That’s why it is a big issue. Don’t think I don’t know that.
“The amount of money available to the NHS is decided by the government. We are going to have less money to meet rising demands. If the [Whittington] hospital continues as it is, then some other things get cut. We have to work out what the best judgments are to make. There are difficult and hard decisions to be made. I have to balance the books.”
Five hospitals in north and central London – including the Whittington and Royal Free – have been told they will lose £900million over the next five years.
Ms Tyndall told the meeting that keeping the Whittington open with an A&E costs around £180m a year. She said it was impossible to say how much closing the A&E department would save. Two-thirds of its patients – around 150,000 people – attend the hospital via the emergency department’s doors each year.
The cuts to hospital funding are part of reforms set in motion by the former health minister Lord Darzi, who quit last year.
His idea was to downgrade hospitals and move 60 per cent of emergency treatments into GP-run health centres.
The NHS boardroom mantra is “localise where possible, centralise where necessary”.
Under the plans, the vast majority of patients who would currently head to the Whittington would travel to the Royal Free A&E – or to GP treatment centres, many of which have not yet been set up yet.
NHS bosses are proposing to install a small team of GPs into an “Urgent Care Centre” in the Whittington who would assess patients during “waking hours” between 8am and 8pm.
NHS London medical director Dr Andy Watts said: “GPs know how to treat people in a much more holistic way than  junior doctors. It will be popular and well used. It will help to reduce health inequalities.”
But, during a lively meeting, one man shouted back at him, “we are getting lots of hogwash from you people”.
“Let’s cut the bonuses and managers not the A&E,” he added.
Another woman said: “If you are stabbed at 3am, there will be nowhere for you to go.”
And another asked: “Have you seen the traffic? What about the snow?”
While managers argue these changes are “clinically led”, campaigners believe they are actually a government master-plan to sell off chunks of the NHS to the private sector.
Ms Tyndall said all major decisions would be subject to a three-month consultation, likely to begin in the summer.
Anna Rathbone, a GP from Haringey, said: “Are these not political decisions made by a national government that highly paid bureaucrats are telling us we have a say in? In London they will downgrade or close dozens of hospitals and open 150 polyclinics, or poly-systems. The whole purpose of this was to allow the private sector access to elective parts of the NHS. I’ve heard all this nonsense before and downgrading a hospital is the beginning of the end.”
Former health secretary Labour MP Frank Dobson, who hobbled in following a hernia operation last week, said: “I have spent 22 minutes stuck in traffic in Camden High Street on my way to hospital. I know all too well that it can be a bit of a problem getting around London’s streets. If this happens, the A&E will be further away for most of you. The Whittington has had massive improvement in recent years and I think if you keep battling away they will eventually agree the A&E has got to stay.”
Shirley Franklin, who has set up the Defend Whittington Coalition, said: “We are going to have a big march on February 27th. This is a horrible, horrible proposal.”
Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn, who organised the meeting, said: “We need people to get out to the demo on the 27th. We will be taking signatures that day for a petition to the Department of Health. We need to show them we’re determined.”