ippr publish report dealing with the politics of change

The Chairman of Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust has welcomed the publication of the latest report in the ‘FutureHospital’ series from the Institute of Public Policy Research (ippr).   ippr’s previous report, published in January, set out the case for progressive change in hospital services.   The report calculated that if heart attack care was re-organised, nationwide 500 extra lives could be saved every year and there would be 1,000 fewer repeat heart attacks and 250 fewer strokes.   This latest report – ‘The Future Hospital ;The politics of change’   - deals with some of the reasons many people do not believe hospital consultations to be genuine and how they could be better organised.

Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust Chairman, Clive Thompson, CBE says: “Discussions under the ‘Fit for the Future’ banner, about local healthcare across Surrey, have now been going on for around 18 months.   In that time NHS finances appear to have got better but the same problems with clinical services remain.    This ippr report calls for national agreements and frameworks for consultation on major changes to health services.   I am supportive of this because as the report says, the current system is dysfunctional.   But, in Surrey, we already have a framework with the Clinical Options report that was published as recently as March 2007.    We must not lose sight of this important report which is supported by two out of three of the local acute hospitals and Surrey PCT.”           

“In early February we sent a copy of the previous ippr report to all local newspaper and radio news editors for information.   The Trust is doing the same with this latest report because we want a proper debate about health services – not the current unwarranted scaremongering we are seeing from ill-informed quarters.    Changes to local hospital services requires healthy, well-informed debate and we want to engage in that debate.  We have already started discussions with our clinicians on how we can improve our networks with other Trusts.    A good example of this is the Vascular Surgical Network where surgeons work across Ashford and St. Peter’s, Frimley Park and North Hampshire hospitals.”

Mr Thompson continued: “We also believe that, as described in the latest report, the ‘black box’ of hospital safety needs to be opened up in order to allow local stakeholders to judge the performance of local hospitals.  Local people should be given the choice of whether they want to retain all services locally or create some centres of excellence which may require additional travel but will save more lives.   This would be counter balanced by some services being moved out of hospitals to be provided in the community – closer to home.   If the authors of the ippr report and the national health advisers are correct, for the sake of relatively short distances should we be sacrificing lives that could be saved?”