There is a hospital cuts consultation drop in at Hebden Bridge Town Hall from 2pm-8pm on Tuesday 5th April.
Save our A&Es campaigners from Calderdale 38 Degrees NHS campaign and Calderdale and Kirklees 999 Call for the NHS are recommending that members of the public wait until the “Have Your Say” hospital cuts Consultation Document is fit for purpose, before responding to hospital cuts consultation survey
They say the Clinical Commissioning Groups behind the proposals need to fix the errors and omissions in their “Have Your Say” Consultation Document.
The consultation document doesn’t allow the public to make an objective, fair judgement on the hospital cuts proposals, because key information is missing and it also contains misleading information.
For example, the “Have Your Say” Consultation Document doesn’t tell us:
- whether or how Yorkshire Ambulance Service will be able to cope with the extra 10,000 hours/year of ambulance journey time that would result from closing Huddersfield A&E
- what the risk assessment is of increased patient deaths resulting from the closure of Huddersfield A&E
- whether the capacity exists to provide safe Care Closer to Home, as an alternative to acute and emergency hospital services
- what the evidence is that Care Closer to Home would reduce the numbers of acute and emergency hospital admissions
- whether the proposed new hospital services model will deliver the required standard of care
- etc etc
If you attend a consultation drop in, please will you ask some or all of these questions and let us know what answers you get? You can email this info to changingmorethanlightbulbs@gmail.com
*At Hebden Bridge & Todmorden drop ins, please ask about the Vanguard scheme.*
The Consultation Document also gives wrong information, for example it claims that the hospital Trust’s higher than average Summary Hospital level Mortality Indicator for the year July 2014 – July 2015 is a justification for the proposed “reconfiguration” of the hospitals, but the fact is that this is not indicative of any such thing.
The most recent legal advice to Calderdale and Kirklees 999 Call for the NHS is to ask the CCGs for further, accurate information on all the misleading info/missing info, and for them to make all that info available to the public, on the Right Care Right Time Right Place website.
At the moment, the public simply don’t have the information needed to make an objective, fair assessment of the proposals. So please, when you attend consultation drop ins or public meetings, ask the Clinical Commissioning Groups to produce the missing info, above and to correct the misleading info.
And please leave filling in the the survey until the Clinical Commissioning Groups have given the public ALL the accurate information needed to form a fair opinion of the proposals. If you fill it in now, without all the info you need, you won’t be able to come back and fill it in again when you know more.
You can find Plain Speaker reports on the proposed hospital cuts here.
You can find more info about the campaign to Save both Calderdale and Huddersfield A&Es and stop the NHS cuts and sell offs here.
Facebook: 999 Call for the NHS Calderdale & Kirklees
Twitter: @SaveCRH
Did anyone go to the consultation? Would be interested to hear feedback.
Yes Adam, I went along with a few other Save our A&Es campaigners. As soon as I can bear to revisit the depressing experience, I’ll be reporting on it – beyond the fact that this misleading mantra about the costly old folk was trotted out by various CCG staff, and when challenged, they had no idea that it was a myth that has been thoroughly debunked by Prof Allyson Pollock and others.
A member of the public came out saying the CCG staff had been gaslighting her – I had to ask her what this means . Once she explained, I understood from observing and experiencing how the CCG staff interacted with the public, that they were indeed employing the techniques of gaslighting.