Posted: Oct 03, 2017 10:15 am
Scot Dutchy wrote:. The more obvious one is specialisms done in hospitals. We have four hospitals in our group area and certain departments have closed and moved to others so we dont have hospitals all offering the same care and treatment.
This has been something that successive Government's have tried to move towards in England over the last twenty years but, has met with considerable opposition from the public. We don't need hundreds of identikit acute hospitals across the country, because that creates a lot of duplication and waste. The problem is the public suffer from HIMBYism (Hospital In My Back Yard) and don't understand why they shouldn't have all the acute services in their locality, so refuse to accept that such services should move. But, we don't need a cardiac speciality in every hospital. We don't need a maternity service in every hospital.
But, you suggest that someone might have to drive 5 to 20miles further to access these services and you'd think someone had pissed in their cornflakes and suggested they eat it!
The barrier to success here isn't the health service but, the politicisation of the health service and the numerous problems with our current political system which allow local MPs to use the local NHS as a bargaining chip. The 2012 Act (for all its faults), was a step in the right direction at moving the NHS further from the political sphere but, its probably not far enough to allow decisions about re-configuring services to be made free of interference.