How will we cope without hospital?

HALTON Hospital is to close.

I attended the meeting of the Corporate Policy And Performance Board on February 27, where it was confirmed that Halton hospital is to close.

The excess land is to be sold for housing.

How the full range of services and facilities, including the Brooker Centre and the Macmillan Centre are to be replicated is uncertain.

A presentation to the meeting by the CEO David Parr about ‘One Halton’ was given and differed considerably from the document ‘One Halton’ that has been given to the executive board.

The presentation was weak, lacking in any detail as to how One Halton is to work, except that there will be 4 GP hubs - two each in Runcorn and Widnes.

How that will work wasn’t clear (to me at least). Will this mean the closure of the existing GP practices? Where will the ‘hubs’ be sited?

What if the GP Hub is not easily accessible by public transport? Has the difficulty for the elderly, ill or disabled been considered?

The emphasis was all about keeping people well so they did not need to access services and to use new technologies - fair enough, but how was that to work?

Being ‘triaged’ by a nurse to point you in the right direction was mentioned, but is that safe?

Councillors were not allowed to question the CEO unless they were a member of the board. Any questions that councillors had were to be dealt with after the presentation by the CEO in a separate room.

No real public air time, unless you had submitted a question beforehand. A statement submitted to the board critiquing the One Halton document that has just come to light was not read out, despite being submitted before the meeting.

How is this democratic?