This is the 7th Plain Speaker report on the hospital cuts plans that are scheduled for public consultation, starting at the end of February.
It looks at proposals for expanding Calderdale Royal Hospital into a 615 bed acute and emergency hospital – the only one in Calderdale and Kirklees.
The “Right Care Right Time Right Place” Pre Consultation Business Case could well be called “Less Care, Whenever and Wherever You Can Find It”
The basic plan is to
- Knock down HRI, and sell off the site for development.
- Build a 119 bed planned care clinic plus outpatients and and urgent care centre on Acre Mill – leaving Kirklees without an A&E.
- Take services out of the hospital and put them in the community (so-called Care Closer to Home).
- Expand CRH from 400-ish beds to 615 and make it the unplanned (acute) care hospital and “emergency care centre” for both Kirklees and Calderdale, plus an urgent care centre
- Cut 755 staff and around 77 hospital beds,
- Set up an urgent care centre in Todmorden. (The urgent care centres would befor minor ailments and accidents. The independent clinical senate review worries that the urgent care centre staffing proposals are inadequate: they don’t guarantee a doctor would be present and they would rely on skyping colleagues in the Emergency Care Centre for advice) Update 5 March: The Clinical Commissioning Group has abandoned the proposal for a Tod urgent care centre.
- Take extra A&E patients to CRH, as a result of the closure of Dewsbury A&E and its replacement with an urgent care centre