Councillor joins battle to keep hospital in Chelsea
MAN SAID HE ‘WOULD BE IN A BOX’ IF IT WAS NOT FOR ROYAL BROMPTON
A COUNCILLOR who said he might have died were it not for a worldclass heart hospital has urged residents to join a battle to keep it in Chelsea.
He was speaking after Kensington & Chelsea Council launched a petition on the change.org website calling for a rethink on plans to move the specialist staff from the Royal Brompton Hospital to work at St Thomas’ at Southwark.
Councillor Adrian Berrill-Cox, who has muscular atrophy, said: “This time last year I was in an ambulance on the way to the Brompton. If I had to wait another 20 minutes I might well have been in a box, not making this speech.”
His comments came after council leaders have written to health secretary Matt Hancock warning of the disastrous impact if the Royal Brompton Hospital were to move from Chelsea to Westminster Bridge Road.
They picked Mr Hancock up on the Conservative pre-election pledge to open 40 new hospitals in the country and said hundreds of thousands of patients rely on the Royal Brompton for life-saving care.
The councillors said: “There is no doubt the NHS is pushed in terms of finances and support and more investment is needed in the coming years. No doubt selling off prime real estate in the heart of west London is considered a pot of gold that is too hard to ignore.
“But this is not an excuse for our communities to lose local healthcare facilities, on which thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – rely.”
Speaking at full council, Cllr Berrill-Cox urged residents to support the petition, adding that he had urgent treatment at the hospital last year.
He said plans to move the hospital from Sidney Street “is quite simply an act of vandalism”.
“I don’t see how we or the neighbouring hospitals can sign up to what amounts to an egregious act of asset stripping, trading great social health and employment asset for yet more flats to sit with their lights off for most of the year.”
The council’s deputy leader Kim Taylor-Smith said it was “vital that we retain this great institution in the borough”.
The Sidney Street hospital is in his ward.
He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that “apart from the first-class medical services the facilities also host many local services and this will be lost, let alone the loss of employment”.
The Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said it was not closing and plans to be at its current site for around the next 10 years.
Earlier this year Guys and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust announced plans to work more closely with the Brompton and Harefield Trust in caring for patients with heart and lung conditions.
A Royal Brompton spokesperson said: “It has become increasingly clear to the boards of both trusts that full integration of the services provided by Royal Brompton & Harefield with those at Guy’s and St
Thomas,’ in effect an agreed merger, is the best and most positive way of securing these aims and the collective vision of the wider partnership.
The plan will include a hub for clinical academic cardio-respiratory services at St Thomas.’
Eventually, their colleagues from the Royal Brompton would join them there.
They said their plans had the backing of NHS England, which considered the merger a way to “secure a sustainable future for the Royal Brompton and continued delivery of world-class care”.