Monthly Archives: December 2016

Future Fit Cuts: The meeting where the NHS bosses want to give formal approval to the closure of an A&E is at 6.30 pm on Monday 12th December, Telford International Centre, St Quentin Gate, Telford TF3 4JH

This is an important meeting. We need the largest possible public attendance. The meeting takes us decisively closer to the loss of one of our A&Es.

Health bosses want to slash spending on local NHS services by around £150 million every single year. Part of the cuts and closure plan is Future Fit: the closure of one of our A&Es and the downgrading of one of our acute hospitals to a ‘Planned Care Centre’. Currently it seems that Telford’s Princess Royal A&E is more at risk than Shrewsbury – but either way, we’ll all end up with an A&E less than half the capacity of our current A&Es, and longer journeys to access either emergency care or routine planned care. Across Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and Powys, we all lose out. There are no winners when major NHS cuts are driven through.

There are other cuts: £3.8 million cuts to Shropshire’s community hospitals; deep cuts to hip and knee replacement surgery; cuts to rural maternity services…  Part of the plan is to transfer 30% of activity out of hospitals, but without the investment to pay for care in community settings. The pretence is that ‘resilient communities’ and ‘self-care’ will fill the gaps. They call this ‘care close to home’!

A Clinical Commissioning Group Joint Committee meeting (Shropshire, and Telford & Wrekin) on Monday 12th December will decide the Future Fit preferred option i.e. the A&E they want to close. We need NHS users there to remind them that the NHS belongs to us. We have our own preferred option: two A&Es, two hospitals, and the money to pay for decent health and social care.

Monday evening’s meeting is an incredibly important one. We need maximum public attendance to make it clear that we will defend BOTH our A&Es and BOTH our hospitals, Telford and Shrewsbury alike. Come to the meeting: 6.30pm, Monday 12 December at the Telford International Centre, St Quentin Gate, Telford, TF3 4JH. You can find the paperwork for the meeting here:
http://www.telfordccg.nhs.uk/joint-committee-board

Two other events you may be interested in are these NHS Clinical Commissioning Group meetings:

• Telford and Wrekin CCG, Tuesday 13th December. Hadley Park House Hotel, Hadley Park East, Telford TF1 6QJ. Time not yet published. This will eventually be found in a link from this page: http://www.telfordccg.nhs.uk/governance-board-papers-2016
• Shropshire CCG, 9.00 am, also on Tuesday 13th December. The Regency Suite, the Lord Hill Hotel, Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury SY2 6AX.

It is very likely that both of these meetings will be signing off the Sustainability and Transformation cuts plan of which Future Fit is a part. The meeting times have been changed to put them on the same day. Draw your own conclusions about why.