Health and care not just about elderly

Concern about health and care services often relates to the needs of the elderly, but the location (at the Gulbenkian Theatre) of the health service hustings invites attention to the universities’ needs too. The Kent & Medway Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP, November draft), while claiming that no hospital closures have been decided, points unmistakably at the Kent & Canterbury Hospital.

This inference was strongly denied at the STP “listening event” on February 3 in Canterbury but, not surprisingly, no such assurance was offered at a similar event in Ashford 14 days later.

Students tend to be discounted in NHS planning, as being predominantly an age group with few medical needs.

But in how many other UK cities with nearly 40,000 students do they have to travel nearly 20 miles for the nearest acute hospital?

The loss of K&C as an acute hospital would surely impair students’ perception of the quality of life here, and with increasing national and international competition to attract students.

This cannot be good for Canterbury universities nor for the economic welfare of the city.

Sir Julian Brazier places great hope in his proposal for a medical school in Canterbury.

This would be an excellent development if it occurred – and if it brought an acute hospital back to Canterbury.

But as a rescue operation for the acute hospital in Canterbury, there are questions about timing.

If the STP process succeeds in finishing K&C as an acute hospital, it will have done so before any medicalschool scheme could get off the ground.

And it hardly seems likely that, after all the investment of recent years in the Ashford and Margate hospitals, more investment would then be forthcoming to bring back acute medical services to Canterbury.

Since the well-being of their students must be a high priority for the universities one assumes that they are making representations as effectively as they can. Denis Linfoot Stanmore Court, Canterbury

As the immediate past president of the Canterbury Hospital League of Friends, I, along with several hundred others, took part in Saturday’s march in Canterbury but was deeply saddened by the fact that it seemed to have been taken over by some of the lesser political parties with their many coloured political banners and grossly imposing loud hailers.

Those of us who genuinely care about our hospital believe that East Kent will hugely benefit with a new major hospital based here centrally in Canterbury.

Supported by an advanced medical school run by our principal universities this will provide the services needed for our scarily expanding population here.

It would have been more effective had the march been silent. George Metcalfe Councillor for the Blean Forest Ward and immediate past Lord Mayor

It was good to see so many people marching through Canterbury on Saturday to express their pain and outrage at the health authorities’ plans to downgrade the Kent and Canterbury Hospital. But we shouldn’t have to do it. We are repeatedly told, “This is OUR Health Service.”

If this is the case why is there not a way by which we local people can have a real influence on OUR local health services?

The plans, which will almost certainly propose reducing the Kent and Canterbury to a small cottage hospital, have been worked up over many months in the offices of hospital trusts, CCGS, and KCC Social Services, without any opportunity for local people to say: this is not what we want.

We can be proud of the NHS but its great weakness is that it is run by a nationalised bureaucracy, driven from the centre, with the camouflage of internal market thrown in.

It can unfortunately produce something as idiotic as the proposed ‘East Kent doughnut’— with hospital services proposed to be on the edges – and a big empty hole in the centre, in Canterbury. We will fight these plans. But would it not have been better to avoid this meaningless confrontation, and to draw local people into the discussions from the start, leading, yes, possibly, to a compromise (the way of democracy), but nevertheless to something far, far better than what is now going to be on offer. Martin Vye Patrixbourne Road Bridge