Fern Bast has good reason to celebrate and praise the NHS in Calderdale. She recently had an amazing, successful operation to repair her damaged, degenerating spine and it is now repairing itself.

However, her experience with Opcare, the company that runs the recently privatised Wheelchair Service, has been less happy – to the extent that in March this year she made a formal complaint to Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) about the completely inappropriate conditions she found, when she attended the Opcare outreach clinic at Beechwood Medical Centre in Halifax, for a fitting for a powered chair.

5 months on, Calderdale CCG has still not got to the bottom of the problem. Continue reading →