Two town councillors have urged people in Wellington to alert NHS officials as to how much the hospital is valued in the community. Comments can be lodged online at www.sompar.nhs.uk
“It would be a sad day for Wellington if the Community Hospital had to close. Having had relatives cared for there I couldn’t have wished for a better hospital.,” said Cllr Janet Reed. “The support from the Hospital League of Friends have been unstinting. It would be very difficult for many older residents to access a larger facility to visit every day which often is the case when having a spouse needing the care of this great local establishment.”
Her view were echoed by Cllr Mark Lithgow who said,” I have also had relatives who have needed care from this valuable hospital and I can only say that the care was of a very high standard. This is a part of a worrying trend of recruitment issues across the NHS.
“Milverton is losing its GP practice, Musgrove Park Hospital is having to cancel non-emergency operations due to staff shortages.Wellington’s Community Hospital is one of 13 small Somerset hospitals at risk of closure. What does it take for the current ruling government to admit the NHS is in crisis. Serious decisions need to be taken to ensure the NHS is properly funded to provide the basic care needed for the vulnerable members of our community.
Glad to see that a couple of councillors have reacted to my original post. I suggest that, as a start, they try to get copies of agendas and minutes from the appropriate authorities more than 24 hours before actual decision taking meetings take place. My experience, if you were not officially inside the NHS ‘Web’ as a representative or an observer, was that ‘public consultation’ was often a box to be ticked rather than anything meaningful.
Mr Williams, thank you for your advice. I will be doing that. As you stated in your earlier post, you had some connections with the NHS, any steer from you on who the appropriate authorities are would be most helpful and possibly encourage others to get copies and start to look into this.
With regard to the mention above in the main article of the closure of Milverton surgery, I feel it is well worth saying that in that case too, local residents and others have every right to fight for a comprehensive continuing GP service in their own village, whilst at the same time I also sympathise with the Somerset partnership Trust which is essentially being forced to close the Milverton Surgery premises.
The background to this move is very significant.
The British Medical Association in 2016 identified 43,500 GPs in the NHS. At the same time, NHS England cited nearly a £30 billion gap between patient needs and financial resources a year to 2020/21.
In 2015 a huge total of 600 GP training posts were left vacant. At the same time, the current facts show that, largely due to an ageing population with more complex chronic illness, GP consultations have lengthened in duration and, at the same time, become more frequent.
In 2013 nine out of ten GPs considered bureaucracy and tick-box form-filling took them away from actual patient care and this applied to other health professionals as well, who considered the information gathered often had no relevance or practical use for patient care. A BMA Tracker survey showed 68% of GPs actually considered their work-load unmanageable and GP recruitment into training post has fallen for the past 3 years. Vacancy rates have continued to rise in GPs with nearly one in ten partnerships having vacancies in 2015 in England
So, where have so many doctors gone? 22,000 went to work overseas between 2008 and 2014 and when the new junior doctors’ contract was enforced in November 2015, there were 3,468 requests filed to practice outside the UK in the following 10 days, which compares with the 200-250 which might have normally been expected over the same period.
A further BMA study identified that, 8 years after graduation, 10% of doctors intended to work permanently overseas, whilst a whopping one third intended to work either temporarily or permanently overseas.
The establishment of golden handshakes of £20,000 to encourage a newly qualified GP to go to the less popular areas is merely robbing Peter to pay Paul. The ambition to recruit 5,000 extra GPs by 2020 is clearly unrealistic in the face of falling recruitment to training programmes and many older GPs are seeking to retire early.
Milverton is, sadly, the result of chronic underfunding of the NHS, This is called ‘Austerity’, a policy completely driven by the twin ambition of the current Conservative administration to balance the budget and, at the same time, not raise taxes. This has lead to progressive damage to our public services, not only the NHS but also the Prison Service, Local Authorities, the Police and Emergency services, to name those which have increasingly featured in the public eye due to apparent evidence of failure..
The Liberal Democrats in this constituency are clearly opposed to these damaging fiscal and social policies. We support the efforts of the people of Milverton to keep their surgery and ask the question which is the next small community to have its services axed.
It is clear our local MP does little except wring her hands in this situation; surely we deserve better than this.?
Please do not turn this into a political issue!! As a District Councillor and a Conservative I am disillusioned by this approach. We are all trying to preserve necessary services for our communities and there is simply no need to make this into a blame game. I have seen enough of this happening in the past and it cuts no ice for me.