Thank you for visiting the Keep Worthing and Southlands Hospitals (KWASH) website. Your continued support is appreciated. Some progress has been made but the battle is not over yet.... There are February and March letters to the press below written by MPs Tim Loughton and Peter Bottomley as well as KWASH chairman Major Tom Wye and the vitally important KWASH clinicians.
These are to keep people up-to-speed with the campaign whilst we await the outcome of the Fit for the Future consultation.
Further updates will also be posted as things progress....
*****SEE BELOW FOR DETAILS OF A FREE FAMILY FUN DAY IN SUPPORT OF OUR LOCAL HOSPITALS*****
9 May UPDATE
As expected, the West Sussex PCT announced at its public Board meeting this week that the option they have selected for the future of local hospital services is 'Service Model Three'. This means that a number of key services like accident and emergency and intensive care will remain at WASH. Full details of that announcement can be found on the PCT website by following this link: www.westsussexpct.nhs.uk/news-and-events/pr-may-2008/ae-departments-to-remain-at-all-three-hospitals/
However the decision also means that full maternity services will be centralised either at Worthing or at St Richards. That decision will be made at a further public Board meeting on Wednesday 4 June with the time and venue still to be announced. We would welcome your support at that meeting when the details are announced.
In the meantime, keep up the pressure - contact the PCT and tell them you want full consultant-led maternity at Worthing - Fitforthefuture@westsussexpct.nhs.uk or telephone: 0800 707 6975.
The KWASH campaign is keeping a close watch on all that the PCT is doing - and is keeping all options open, including the prospect of going to judicial review should the PCT decide to axe full maternity and paediatric services from Worthing.
Show your support at....
Dave Hunt (Splash FM) and the group “Reflections” have organised a family fun day for 1st June commencing at 2.30 pm at the LIDO. Dave and some of the group have good reasons to be thankful to WASH and have arranged this fun day as a way of saying “Thank you”.
Admission is FREE and is designed to cater for families. The group Reflections will “Roll back the years” with music and Dave Hunt will fill the gaps with his entertaining chatter, games and music. There will be guest appearances. Please put this in your diary and bring the family for an afternoon of good honest seaside fun. Remember it is FREE!!!!
28 April 2008 UPDATE
Decision time is getting near......
This is the timetable that the West Sussex PCT has set out and you can click here to see their latest news bulletin.
Peter Bottomley, Tim Loughton and Major Tom Wye letter (10 March 2008).
It has now been almost four months since the end of the PCT’s consultation exercise for the reconfiguration of hospital services in West Sussex. Inevitably things give the appearance of having gone quiet on the ‘home front’ in this interim period and it might be useful if we were to update your readers with the likely next steps.
It is now clear that the fantastic campaigns run by KWASH and our sister organisations fighting for services at St Richards and the Princess Royal, which articulated the overwhelming opposition and concerns of local people, succeeded in forcing the PCT to think again. Subsequently the original three narrow options for those hospitals have been shelved and Professor Sir Graeme Catto, the expert brought into to advise the PCT has broadened these options to include keeping A&E services on all three sites. It now looks likely that this will be confirmed shortly. The devil remains in the details however. We await further reassurances about the exact level of emergency clinical cover at these A&E departments particularly as regards emergency surgery.
A debate is still continuing over the likely configuration of maternity services and to what level these may be centralised and the likely demand for midwife led units more widely spread. We have said all along a key consideration here is the existing pressures on the Royal Sussex County Hospital as the nearest alternative. Management there have been very positive in supporting the case for Worthing’s excellent maternity unit.
A lot has been going on behind the scenes over the past four months. Worthing’s consultants have been involved in many meetings with their clinical colleagues and with the PCT to make the case for any changes to be acceptable and right at Worthing. We have liaised with them closely and will continue to do so. Last week all eight West Sussex MPs met the PCT to discuss progress and were advised of the following timetable. Earlier in the week several MPs gave evidence to the County Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee. This followed the evidence we gave in the autumn, in front of the PCT and in time to influence recent events.
The first announcement will come at the PCT board meeting on May 7th when a decision will be made on the model of care of health services in West Sussex and the configuration of hospitals. The following month on June 4th the PCT board will meet to decide on the actual physical sites at which those services will be based. At the PCT board meeting on July 10th they will take into account the views of the Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee and confirm or modify their decisions accordingly. Thereafter it will be up to the JHOSC to decide if they want to refer the PCT proposals to the Department of Health and the judicial reviews and other possible challenges could then go ahead.
The actual proposals are likely to be known a week before the PCT meetings as they publish the papers in advance and they are available to the public, though of course subject to the actual decisions being approved at the board meetings themselves. It is likely therefore to be a further seven weeks or so before we have a clearer idea of what is going to happen.
The battle is far from over and we must all continue to be vigilant and support the KWASH cause for which so many worked so hard and so long. Our determination to make sure that our constituents do not see our popular local hospitals downgraded is undiminished and we will continue to work closely with the consultants, hospital managers, our fellow campaigners and the PCT. We all pulled together in the heights of the public campaign last year. Now the work is still intense though less noisy. In the meantime keep your Nurse Sunshine posters up and we still have a supply of fresh ones if yours is looking a little battle scarred!
Thank you for all your continued support for KWASH and we will make sure you are updated just as soon as we have further news.
Yours
Tim Loughton MP
Peter Bottomley MP
Major Tom Wye MBE (Chairman KWASH)
KWASH Clinicians Letter to press (21 Feb 2008)
Whilst we are very pleased that the PCT and its independent adviser appear to have accepted the idea of maintaining acute medicine, ITU and A&E on both the Worthing and St Richard's sites, it is very important to note that the proposals still leave a significant difference between the planned Major general hospital site (MGH) and the planned local general hospital (LGH).
KWASH have consistently supported the idea of maintaining both acute surgery and consultant led obstetrics on both sites (although accepting that the size of the units may be different). The new plans however plan for a 'phased centralisation' of both these services on one site.
Whilst we are disappointed and worried about this, we acknowledge that the proviso that this will be in the light of emerging evidence allows the possibility of a change of emphasis in the future.
This is particularly important as we believe an A&E without acute surgical, paediatric or maternity back up will not remain a genuine viable A&E department as we know it. We believe the evidence will clearly demonstrate that these services are best maintained on both acute sites.
However, If the final decision of the PCT is to centralise either of these services, it is absolutely clear that it is inconceivable to any one reviewing all the evidence, requirements, population, geography and deprivation indices, that any single full acute surgical and full consultant maternity service could be anywhere except on the Worthing site, due to the vastly higher level of services already provided , and (particularly for obstetrics) due to the much higher levels of deprivation in Worthing which is clearly linked to perinatal and maternal risk and which requires close availability of high-class consultant led services (as exemplified, for example, by the maternity decisions in East Sussex).
If this is the future PCT decides on (and we emphasise that we still believe the evidence will support maintaining services across both sites), KWASH remain committed to maintaining the highest quality of healthcare possible for the population of West Sussex: in a single major site solution this can clearly only be achieved with the major site at Worthing. The saving grace is that the new proposals, compared with the old ones, mean that the far western population of Sussex will at least preserve their local acute medical and A&E services.
KWASH Clinicians
KWASH Chairman Major Tom Wye
THE BATTLE IS NOT OVER YET!
KWASH welcomes many of the recommendations put forward by Sir Graeme Cato but have some major concerns about others.
The question to be asked is “When is an A&E not an A&E”? While Sir Graeme is recommending acute medicine, ITU and A&E at both St Richards and Worthing he is advocating that acute surgery/orthopaedics and consultant led obstetrics be limited to a single site.
Our concerns are that if acute surgery is moved to a single site then patients with appendicitis requiring surgery to remove appendix will have to travel to the single remaining site for treatment, likewise a patient with a broken hip requiring repair. There is no evidence to support the theory that centralizing non specialist, high volume surgery is beneficial for patients.
Stand alone midwifery led units do not have the support of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists because of the lack of proven safety. Worthing is an excellent hospital that serves its patients well. It needs its acute surgery/orthopaedics and consultant led obstetrics if it is to continue to provide the level of service the patients in the catchment area require (and deserve).
The loss of any services will de facto be a downgrading. We have the clinicians, we have the facilities. Our elderly population, young mothers and children (especially those living in areas of deprivation) need them to be retained locally.
Major Tom Wye
The KWASH campaign is a cross political party campaign fighting to keep vital health services in Worthing. The consultants and other clinical staff at Worthing and Southlands Hospitals, and local GPs are also a vital part of the campaign.
The West Sussex Primary Care Trust and the South East Coast Strategic Health Authority have proposed that services such as consultant-led maternity, consultant-led emergency and intensive care are removed from Worthing.
Their public consultation on the plans closed on 14 November 2007. The KWASH campaign submitted a formal response to the consultation which is available by clicking here (this is a large file, so take care when downloading).
As well as the formal response, the clinicians at Worthing and Southlands Hospitals have submitted an alternative clinical proposal - one that would see vital services retained in Worthing.
A petition with an enormous 129,732 signatures has also been presented to the West Sussex Primary Care Trust chief executive John Wilderspin.
The campaign has been running for around 18-months, and there is still some time until the PCT Board makes its final decisions. This is likely to be in the spring of 2008.