More information has become available about the proposal to cut the Calderdale Royal Hospital A&E department and centralise A&E sevices in Huddersfield.
Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group has clarified that this is only part of a proposal for a whole new model of providing hospital and community services for people across Calderdale and Greater Huddersfield.
It involves a massive shakeup of the way the whole NHS operates in our areas.
This new model has been drawn up by Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust (CHFT), Locala and South and West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (SWYFT).
Under this new model for hospital and community services, CHFT, Locala and SWYFT would together work closely with general practice, social care and voluntary organisations to deliver integrated health and social care and support in community settings.
This would include moving current hospital-based services outside hospital and closer to where people live.
Integrated teams of health and social care professionals would support people to take maximum responsibility for their own care and wellbeing.
Personal healthcare budgets – the end of the universal, equitable, freely available NHS
“Supporting people to take maximum responsibility for their own care and wellbeing” is code for paying for your own health care through personal health budgets – something which removes the core NHS principle of universal, equitable access to health care which is free at the point of need.
Personal health budgets are intermediate step in the NHS privatisers’ plans to get people to pay for their health care through private insurance.
Calderdale Council’s and Calderdale CCG’s joint Better Care Fund Submission (a bid for NHS money that is to be transferred to the Council to pay for social care) is largely a copy and paste from a report on the Kaiser Beacons project written by an NHS free marketeer called Chris Hams.
This Kaiser Beacons project was a pilot to test the American private insurance health care model as used by the Kaiser Permanente company. Birmingham East & North PCT (which included one of the Kaiser Beacons projects) stated that:
“by 2012 all individuals should have access to their own personal health plan and potential for personal health budgets…[this would] dramatically shift care responsibility to members of the public and much of that care will be undertaken by them in their own homes.”
Reduced hospital beds across the board
Under the CHFT proposals for reorganising (privatising) Calderdale and Kirklees NHS, fewer people would receive hospital treatment. Acute and emergency services would be based on one specialist hospital site, with the preference that this would be in Huddersfield.
Hospital beds would be reduced across the board.
Patients for planned and elective care would go to a second specialist planned care hospital site, with the preference that this would be at Calderdale Royal Hospital.
CHFT, Locala and SWYFT have presented the model to the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in the area, because the CCGs commission and pay for the hospital and community services that are included in the new model.
Their proposals are contained in the Calderdale and Huddersfield Strategic Review of NHS and Social Care. Here is the CHFTStrategic Review Slideshow.
This is based on a Report that Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust commissioned from the National Clinical Advisory Team (NCAT).
The NCAT report belongs to the Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust.
Calderdale Councillor Tim Swift says that CHFT will make the report public after they have discussed it with the Kirklees Overview and Scrutiny Committee and the Calderdale Health and Wellbeing Board on 4 March.
Last night a public meeting in Hebden Bridge agreed to set up a campaign to stop any cuts to Calderdale and Huddersfield A&E.
Emergency Care Intensive Support Team gives CHFT A&E clean bill of health
The Emergency Care Intensive Support Team recently produced a broadly positive report on CHFT A&E.
Its only reservation about the performance of CHFT A&E was around the decision making process for how the Medical Admissions Unit is handled, and it made some recommendations for improving this.
CHFT have produced an action plan to deal with this which the two CCGs’ Urgent Care Board have agreed to.
Updated 5 March with information about personal healthcare budgets and the Better Care Fund submission.