On a personal note I sincerely hope your child makes a very quick and full recovery.
Hear, hear!
The thing is Mike that a few posts up you were embracing the urgent care centre, but now your stance is your against the closure of A+E and the replacement which is the urgent care centre.
If your against it then that means that even if they give us a urgent care centre lined with gold wallpaper your still against it on the principle of the matter that is they took our Major services away from a area that desperately needs them.
Apologies if I've been unclear. Let me try to explain. I strongly supported the promised Hatfield hospital. You'll recall that John Reid, then Secretary of State for Health, promised to support a bid from the Primary Care Trust for the new hospital. Then the Primary Care Trust, despite a rising budget, decided not to bid.
I agreed with the Primary Care Trust, and clear medical opinion, that larger hospitals provide better quality treatment than smaller hospitals. But I believed that Welwyn Hatfield, being a central location, was a better site than the north of Stevenage.
We all (politicians of all parties and supporters of none) fought against the Primary Care Trust. Sadly, we lost.
Sadly, too, I can't pretend to you that we'll get this decision reversed, and that we'll get the hospital we want. Neither, to be fair, can Grant Shapps.
If the Primary Care Trust wont change their mind maybe they need to be cut?
Perhaps they should. There are too many accountants on the board, and not enough people who understand the importance of representing the public's aspirations. I've argued for a long time that the Primary Care Trust is grossly incompetent. Would that I could persuade Ministers to sack them!
What we want is competent management of the tax income you take from us and deliver the Health & Education services to the standards we demand.
... Look at the total income and stop spending on items we have not given you the authority to spend on.
That will leave more than enough to build a new hospital and deliver the services we pay our taxes for.
I agree this is what politicians should focus on. Dodgy banking practices have landed the whole world in a dreadful mess, and all of us need to focus on what can be done both now and in the coming years to tackle this. But that's perhaps a subject for another thread?
I wish it were true that this could find us the money for another hospital. But, as I said sadly above, I'm not sure this is true. I've no doubt that both political parties will go into the general election promising to protect health spending. But with a (thankfully) aging population, and with public expectations of speed and quality of treatment (rightly) improving, a health budget linked to inflation will not keep pace with our needs.
Labour has massively increased NHS spending in recent years. And there's been massive improvement, for example in waiting times. But the days of such substantial increases are inevitably over for now.
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Topic: Ignorant health bosses cheer on QE2 closure (Read 2157 times)