 |
|
|
|
Cheaper to close - denial of healthcare follows US healthcare prime policy Case being made to fulfill long-time aim for closure - instead of bringing in new services
For many many years, in order to save money, Liverpool's healthcare bosses have been trying to close one of England's unique expert gynaecological hospitals in order to save money! There has never been a true clinical case for closure. ** Decision meeting - tomorrow 9th October 9am Liverpool 1 Suite, Holiday Inn, Lime Street, Liverpool ** However, since the planning of the New Royal Liverpool Hospital, and the planned destruction of the NHS and replacement with the US style healthcare system of denial of healthcare and by fragmenting it into US model of 42 Integrated Care Systems in England; the intention to close the Liverpool Women's Hospital, has been solidified by dishonesty, decrying of the Hospitals excellent record, and the systemic campaign to find 'clinical' arguements to close one of the best maternity services in the country.
With a management team hell-bent on its closure, the concern for patient safety and maternity services, takes second place to the need to save money to making all healthcare services in Cheshire and Merseyside profitable allowing the ICS to keep said profits; all part of the Labour Government's policies and in-keeping with what Blair started in his first term! Healthcare in Cheshire and Merseyside is now being run by the business principles of profit and loss, with the ICS Board (Integrated Care Board) putting personal profit before that of patient need. Whilst there is of course no intention to harm any patients, the aim is to provide safe patient care as cheap as possible, and that requires the cutting of services, of buildings, and the sharing of staff across all Hospitals and replacing doctors with Physician Associates! NHS England, the government quango has made it clear and subject to withholding of funds, that all GP surgeries should be using Physician Associates instead of employing new GPs!
Quoted in an article by the Liverpool Echo, the Chief Medical Officer for Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust, Dr Lynn Greenhalgh said: The health needs of our population, and the treatments we provide, have changed a lot since Liverpool Women’s Hospital first opened, and increasingly gynaecology and maternity patients require input from specialists who are not based on Crown Street. This can impact on people with other serious health conditions that need to be managed alongside their gynaecology and maternity care, those who develop unexpected complications which need urgent support from a different team or from an intensive care unit, and people with very complex surgical needs, including many patients with gynaecological cancer." Yet the reality is this: Women are transferred to Liverpool Women’s Hospital from other hospitals, in Merseyside and beyond. More women are transferred there than are transferred away from Liverpool Women’s hospital
“We want everyone to receive the best care possible, wherever they are being treated in Liverpool. Setting out the issues in the case for change is an important first step in recognising the situation as it stands today, so that we can work with staff, patients, the public and our wider stakeholders, to decide on the best way to move forward.” For 'wider stakeholders' read 'private healthcare sector'! Dr Fiona Lemmens, Deputy Medical Director for NHS Cheshire and Merseyside told the Liverpool Echo: “The way that hospital gynaecology and maternity services in Liverpool are organised means that some care does not meet national care standards. If we don’t address this, there is a growing risk that we might not be able to provide some specialist care in Liverpool in the future." That of course is an implied threat and begs the question, "What type of care is at risk?" And "Then why do you not simply plan to provide it at the Hospital?" Instead she added: "The issues set out in the case for change have been spoken about before, but this is a new opportunity to tackle what we believe is an urgent health priority. All the local NHS organisations involved with gynaecology and maternity care in Liverpool are committed to working together to address these challenges, so that we can improve care for patients and protect services for the future." Asked whether or not the Hospital will be closed, her answer was once again simply smoke and mirrors: “It’s important to stress that while it’s too early in the process to speculate about how services could look in the future, there are no plans to close the Crown Street site. The NHS is continuing to invest in these facilities, which are a key part of our local health system. Whatever proposals might be put forward for gynaecology and maternity services, Crown Street will continue to play a vital role in the provision of NHS services.” This of course confirms what we already know - the decision to remove maternity and gynaecology services from the Crown Street site and close the Liverpool Women's Hospital has already been made in principle! The promised public consultation and taking into account the opinions of the community, will of course have no affect upon a decision already taken. Like all public consultations, it will be quietly announced to ensure minimum response, and in any case such opposing opinions gathered; will be ignored. However, and of course, the ICB will be once again spending public funds on consultants as they have already done so. The Echo article adds: 'Health bosses said that responses gathered during the engagement will be analysed by an independent organisation and put into a report, which is likely to be published in early 2025. Feedback will be used to help inform what happens next, including the development of any proposals for how hospital gynaecology and maternity services could look in the future.'
The bullying of staff which still takes place across the whole of the NHS, will be evident by the intention to 'persuade clinical staff' to accept the plans: 'Subject to NHS Cheshire and Merseyside’s board approving the case for change at its meeting next week, a six-week public engagement will start on October 15. People will be encouraged to share their views on the potentially huge changes.' A series of engagement events, both online and face-to-face, will take place during November 2024, so that people can hear more from those involved in gynaecology and maternity services.' Hold on, according to the statements above the decision has not been made, so how come this announcement and how can this exercise take place if the decision to close the maternity services on site have not been made? But the biggest inconsistency of these statements surround the publication of the report of the public consultation exercises. This is said to be made public in 2025! A date well after the above events take place! Clearly as previously reported by this website, questions raised by members of the public at Board meetings, illicit no response. In reality there is NO public accountability and minutes of decision meetings are either not taken or not provided to the general public. The ICB claim that they are accountable relies on the fact that minutes are available from the ICS website, but this is not generally known by the public and unless the public know beforehand, they are unlikely to be looking at that website. Incidentally, there seems virtually no information available to patients placed in GP surgeries about what the ICS is doing or where to find such information. The major campaign group, Save The Liverpool Women's Hospital has responded via their campaign website: " Liverpool Women’s hospital is the largest maternity Hospital in Europe. It provides maternity, care in multiple births, care for older mothers, care for young and teenage mums, care for pregnant women with health issues, mental health support, assistance and research in fertility. It provides regional Neo-Natal care, Gynaecology, Genetics, support for bereavement, end of life support, an emergency room for gynaecology and early pregnancy and more. It is the main provider of termination services in the area." They added:
Regarding the funding of the Hospital, they point out: "The Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board provides the bulk of funds to the hospital with a small amount coming nationally from funding for specialist services. The ICB in turn gets its funding from NHS England. NHS England funds maternity through what they call the maternity tariff. This maternity tariff is inadequate for safe care. NHS England gets its funding from the Government. The buck stops with the Government." Despite promises given to the Save Liverpool Women's Hospital Campaign being promised details of the proposals for the future of the hospital, no such information has been given to them by the ICB: "We, with more than 70,000 people who have signed our petition (an online version of the petition can be signed here), oppose these plans but we publish this letter so everyone can see all the details we have on the proposals. We have been promised earnestly (!)and repeatedly in board meetings that our campaign would be consulted about plans for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. What we got, however, was a leaked copy of a letter to staff written by the joint chief executive of Liverpool University Hospital Trust and Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We will publish our response shortly." This of course shows that the promises of public views being taken into account and being published, is a false promises and that all any consultation will be purely a box ticking exercise and one which will make no difference to a decision already made! The Campaign's response continues:
"It has over seventy-five thousand signatures. The people of Liverpool have attended three big demonstrations to save the hospital. Campaigners have attended every board meeting of Liverpool Women’s Hospital since the petition was launched and every ICB meeting since that was formed. Yet we have never been invited to present our views. Promises of consultation made in public clearly meant nothing." Their response via their website continues and goes into the detail of the background to the closure aims, basically to save money: "Liverpool Women’s Hospital is a tertiary centre, which means patients are referred there from other hospitals from the rest of Merseyside and Cheshire, the Isle of Man and parts of Wales. Keeping that provision and the reputation that goes with it is important. The provision for the babies in the neonatal unit, near their mums, matters too. We have said for years that the NHS must change the maternity tariff, the amount of money paid to hospitals for delivering maternity care. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is the largest provider of maternity care and is badly hit by how low the tariff is. Liverpool Women’s Hospital runs a deficit because of this, and over the years appears to have made some bad decisions on staffing because of the financial problems. Many midwives left. “The case for change is focussed solely on the clinical risks, issues and outcomes for people using hospital-based gynaecology and maternity services. It does not consider productivity or value for money.” The ICB is in serious financial trouble yet it claims not to be considering money in this situation. We say that right from the beginning, it has been about money. It was about the decision made nearly a decade ago to close one of the Liverpool Hospitals to save money at the cost of our health. It is also about disrespecting women’s health and women’s opinions. “We’ve known for some time that the poorest households and women have shouldered the greatest burden of austerity measures.” Women’s health has suffered particularly in this time. Liverpool has seen some of the worst overall loss of healthcare. Yet we still kept Liverpool Women’s as a treasured service, where most of Liverpool’s babies are born and where great steps have been made in research. We said before and say it again “In these hard times. what we have we hold.” Should we leave structural issues in our health care to “the professionals”? No way. The big managers of the NHS have caused havoc in the last ten years, implementing austerity, privatisation, and the move towards an American model. We have seen more than a decade of damage. Remember the chaos of the building of Liverpool Royal, with fewer beds than the old one and now needing more, with chaos in the financing, construction, and demolition? We call on the city of Liverpool to defend what we have in the NHS and to fight to improve the rest. No closures, no loss of services, no more mergers, no more outsourcing, no more overworked staff. Please sign our petition by clicking on the image above, left. Please attend tomorrows public meeting: 9th October 2024, 9.00am to 11.30am. Liverpool 1 Suite, Holiday Inn, Lime Street, Liverpool, L1 1NQ Source: Save Liverpool Women's Hospital / Cheshire & Merseyside ICB / Liverpool Echo / The i newspaper See also: The Smoke And Mirrors Of Labour's Dishonest NHS Policy NHS Privatisation News Archive See WHO report for further info into poorest households and women
|
 |
Whilst anyone wanting to ensure the continuation of maternity and gynaecological services at the hospital would bring in additional services, including emergency care clinicians, and expand the services available; refusing to do this, sets up the manufactured case for closure.
Furthermore, in the case of the Hospital building in Crown Street, and the hell-bent aim of privatising healthcare services; the intention no doubt will be to sell the building to a private healthcare provider which will then be granted the contract to provide some form of healthcare, not necessarily maternity/gynaecological treatments.
Further despite the fact that this has been planned and argued for all along and even prior to 2016, her comment on the motivation tells another story: 
"Maternity does not feature in the priorities of the ICB despite reporting that many more women experienced a delay in induction of labour. This means that a woman has been told that her baby needs to be born soon and has come into hospital, to have the baby and then is kept waiting (and worrying) for more than 12 hours."
"Our