‘Lives will be lost’
CAMPAIGNERS claim ‘lives will be lost’ due to what they say are hospital services being stripped back.
Michele Martin, organiser of Save Ormskirk and Southport Hospitals campaign group claims Southport is losing a range of services, and has blasted what she claims is a wider nationwide healthcare shake up as ushering in US style private healthcare across the country.
Michele said: “Southport has lost children’s A&E, maternity, the therapy pool has gone, physiotherapy has gone, they’ve moved surgery now to St Helens, they’re now talking about closing the stroke unit.
“As far as the stroke unit is concerned, it’s a real centre of excellence, and Southport is a hotspot for strokes; it’s one of the worst areas for stroke in the whole country.”
However, Southport and Ormskirk NHS Hospital Trust has dispelled the claims, saying some of the changes occurred years ago and while other reports of closures are categorically not true.
The trust says Children’s A and E and maternity services moved to Ormskirk 20 years ago, the therapy pool is awaiting repair, surgery has not changed and most physiotherapy outpatients moved to Ormskirk.
Meanwhile, plans are being considered to move critical stroke care to Aintree but to continue general stroke care at Southport.
Yet campaigners have also criticised national changes brought in under the new Health and Care Act 2022 which came in April, replacing Clinical Commissioning Groups which currently plan and commission local health care services in England with newly formed Integrated Care Systems (ICSs). These have been described by NHS England and NHS Improvement as “partnerships of NHS bodies and local authorities that come together to plan and deliver joined up health and care services”.
Due to come into force by law on July 1, the 42 new bodies include one covering Lancashire and South Cumbria, with a further two in North West including NHS Cheshire and Merseyside and NHS Greater Manchester.
They will be made up of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), which will plan, budget and arrange provision of health services, Integrated Care Partnerships (ICPs), which will produce strategies on health and well being needs, and councils, charities voluntary bodies, local residents, cares and other community partners.
NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board will cover the boroughs of Barrow-in-Furness, Blackburn with Darwen, Blackpool, Burnley, Chorley, Fylde, Hyndburn, Pendle, Ribble Valley, West Lancashire, Rossendale,South Ribble and Wyre and will also take in the City of Lancaster, the City of Preston, and the District of South Lakeland, according to NHS England and NHS Improvement.
But joining voices blasting wider health care reforms, Michele said: “There will be 42 Integrated Care Boards around the country, and it’s Orwellian, not integrated; we will no longer have a national health system, and the local health care boards will decide what we have and they will be able to put business representatives on the board and make a straightforward decision.
“Those integrated Care Boards will have the power of life and death, so we need to put pressure on them to make sure that their contracts are going to NHS people, and units, not to private units who will then strip things away.
She added: “This new reform has gone through on the quiet .... one of the key pieces of legislation was that the NHS logo can be used by anyone who’s a provider, so you’ve got private companies who are running the NHS but they’ve got the NHS logo, which is gaslighting people into thinking that services and staff are NHS when they are private companies.
“In the end, the NHS will be just a logo and a bank account, giving out money to private providers; we won’t have NHS services if they’re allowed to carry on with this.
“Lives will be lost and are already being lost, as life expectancy was going up steadily year on year for dozens of years, and it has stalled from 2010.
“There are lots of people now who are dying because they can’t get ambulances and can’t get the operations they need.”
Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust said that surgery had not moved from Southport Hospital, the hospital’s therapy pool which closed during Covid, subsequently reopened but was temporarily closed pending a repair, the hospital still offered physiotherapy, while most physiotherapy outpatients were seen at Ormskirk and there were also telephone and video consultations.
The trust said stroke care had been the focus of a recent 12 week consultation and would continue at Southport, with proposals to move ‘hyper acute stroke care’ for the critical 72 hours after a stroke to Aintree, and that maternity and children’s services had moved to Ormskirk 20 years ago.
The trust’s managing director