17th January 2012

STOP THE DOWNGRADE CAMPAIGN

Working to reinstate St. John's Hospital as an Acute Emergency Hospital

NEWSLETTER JANUARY 17th 2012

NHS LOTHIAN SLAMMED BY NICOLA STURGEON OVER OPERATIONS IN ENGLAND!

Yes, yet again, you read it here first! When we highlighted in October last year the shabby practice whereby cash-strapped West Lothian patients were offered operations in Northumberland and other parts of England, we had no idea of the scale of the deception. Now it has all been revealed in a report called for by the First Minister last November. Mr. Barbour and his chums at NHS Lothian have escaped formal sanctions, but the censure from Ms. Sturgeon should make them hang their heads in shame!

We would like to thank the three SDC members who highlighted the plight of friends and family who were offered surgical operations down south. They chose to stay loyal to their local hospital and refused. What they didn't know was that in doing so, it gave NHS Lothian the chance to take them off the waiting times statistics simply to make their performance look better than it actually was. We've been saying it for years: you cannot trust NHS Lothian with facts and figures!

The article can be found on our website. This shows that local people, who worked with the Action to Save St. John's Hospital Councillors Gordon Beurskens and Ellen Glass, can bring NHS Lothian to book and expose their shabby practices for all to see. We have excellent contacts with local and national media and we are not afraid to speak out when necessary. There are many journalists who are appalled at the way that public bodies treat those whom they are expected to serve. When we pay the Medical Director of NHS Lothian £240000 per year, we expect a level of service and commitment consistent with this colossal sum of money which few in West Lothian could aspire to. We expect the Board of which he is a member to honour and protect medical services across the whole of Lothian, and not just in Edinburgh. Yet while Edinburgh hospitals are given equipment, buildings and staff, the story of St John's is a constant attrition of services. It is our children's ward which is under threat now because NHS Lothian refuses to give a commitment to its future. Not surprisingly, it is not proving possible to recruit consultant staff to posts at St John's because the word on the street is that it is destined to become a large geriatric hospital. Just recently, management attempted to bring an entire ward of elderly people from Edinburgh to St John's. At the same time, many young people from West Lothian with serious illness simply bypass their local hospital and continue by ambulance into Edinburgh.

The scandal about the manipulation of waiting list figures is just the tip of the iceberg. What about all the NHS patients who are being sent to the Murrayfield private hospital at a cost of millions of pounds? This too was exposed recently with the release of emails between NHS Lothian and the Spire hospital group. My, how the private hospitals were furious that their secret had been exposed! NHS Lothian would sooner spend taxpayer’s money sending patients to the private sector rather than using perfectly good NHS theatres at St John's!

There is a potentially serious conflict of interest here, ignored by the Board, where NHS Lothian consultants can delay the treatment of patients through the NHS route, only for the patient to end up under the same consultant’s knife in an expensive private hospital. This is the flip side of the centralisation of services and it is at its most obvious in orthopaedics where Board policies ensure that all trauma patients are transported to the Royal Infirmary. The Infirmary's theatres fill up with emergency patients from miles away which results in there being an inadequate resource to deal with all the non-urgent patients. These folk are then sent to the private sector to be treated (for a fee) by the same NHS consultants who previously would have provided care in local hospitals such as St John's.

In the last year we have seen NHS Lothian in their true colours and they are grimly BLACK! Not satisfied with trying to hoodwink an unsuspecting public into believing that taking everyone with chest pain on a sightseeing trip to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh before dealing with their condition was a good idea, they were massaging waiting time figures through a combination of private operations and offering people operations hundreds of miles away.

WHEN WILL THE MESSAGE FINALLY GET THROUGH THEIR HEADS? Many people in West Lothian can’t afford the expense of travelling to visit sick and elderly relatives in Edinburgh, so how are they expected to travel to all points south of Berwick? It doesn’t seem to matter to NHS Lothian that patients don’t enjoy being isolated and alone, without visitors because the cost of public transport, or the extortionate cost of car parking, prevents them going to the Royal or to the Western, or to Harrogate.

The staff at St John's have made huge sacrifices. Their numbers have been slashed and their wages frozen for years, with more austerity to come. Yet NHS Lothian finds the money to pay telephone number salaries to their executives while running up a deficit of £2million. The Board are responsible for the biggest white elephant in Scotland - the £1400 million PFI Royal Infirmary. Yet it was they who built that hospital far too small and in the wrong place such that their executives have to send patients all round the country to be treated. This is the legacy that NHS Lothian bosses have bequeathed to the people they purport to serve. They pay themselves handsomely and then retire on the proceeds leaving the people to suffer. You couldn't make it up!

Still, we cannot afford to allow cynicism to blur our thinking. We have to remain focussed on the tasks ahead. And we still have a fight if we are to succeed in securing the future of St. John’s. This has to include the childrens’ ward since, without it, maternity services are threatened, together with the Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU). And without the ITU, there will be no A&E. Yes we have made progress. If we get distracted, the knives will be out again. St. John’s remains very vulnerable in the face of a health board which does not place the patient first, second or third. St John’s CAN be strengthened, but, if we take our eye of the ball, it could suffer a relapse at any moment and turn into the largest geriatric hospital in Scotland!

The Council elections are only a few weeks away on May 3rd. We cannot afford to forget all that our Councillors have achieved on our behalf. Your votes will count now more than ever. If we hadn't had the influence of the Action to Save St. John's Party since 2007, who knows where we would have been. Rest assured the bigger parties wouldn't have been paying as close attention to detail as they have.

Ernie and Marion would be proud of our achievements. Let us honour their memory by building on the successes of the past five years!

We hope that you will help us to defend what is ours by right. Join us at the Glenavon Suite at the Kaim Park Hotel on Thursday 26th January at 7.30pm.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT. WE COULDN’T DO IT WITHOUT YOU! IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO TAKE A MORE ACTIVE ROLE IN SUPPORTING THE CAMPAIGN DEDICATED TO PROTECTING ST. JOHN’S HOSPITAL, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH OR ATTEND OUR NEXT MEETING.

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The SDC Team.

St. John's, the heartbeat of West Lothian