NHS crisis - don't blame patients, blame politicians

Ambulances queue outside Preston hospital

THE winter period is the most important time for Chorley and South Ribble NHS campaigners as it highlights the inadequacies in any healthcare system - especially in our hospitals.

What we need at this time is stability, we need expansion, not the contraction of services NHS England offer under their sketchy five year forward view run by Simon Stevens, ex president of Americas global United health private insurers.

Overcrowding at hospitals is all year round but worse in winter. Remember, over the last two decades successive governments have closed and downgraded dozens of hospitals in England leaving any remaining A&E hospitals to cope with the additional strain.

That is the real reason we are seeing patients waiting hours outside A&E in ambulances. Coupled with massive intentional underfunding of social care, patients in hospital have nowhere to go leading to bed blocking and delayed transfers of care.

With the advent of Clinical Commissioning Groups in 2013 handing out more NHS contracts to the private sector, we've reached a boiling point of mass orchestrated design leading to the deaths of thousands of patients.

Take Burnley general hospital and Chorley district hospital as examples - both in neighbouring trusts. Burnley's A&E served a huge population of over 260,000.

Yet it was closed in 2007 and moved to the Royal Blackburn hospital (RBH) - who already had a huge Private finance initiative (Pfi) debt. The result was total chaos including RBH temporarily closing its doors to ambulances 8 months later, re-directing them to already overstretched hospitals outside the east Lancashire hospital trust's jurisdiction. It's been crisis management ever since.

Chorley & South Ribble hospital has fared no better, closing its doors in April 2016 due to staff shortages and, like Blackburn hospital, resulted in overcrowding at the only remaining A&E at Preston.

Ambulances stuck at Preston once again can't get back on the road to reach emergencies and it emerged this week [5th Jan 2018] a local man died of a suspected heart attack after waiting over 90 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

After an initial investigation, it was decided to re-open Chorley hospital A&E on a part-time 12 hour basis. The Chorley A&E re-opened part-time in January 2017.

The table below shows ambulance handover times at Preston including just after Chorley A&E closed. Handover breaches went from 21 to 313 and serious breaches shot up from 1 to 141. This week [Jan 5th 2018] it was reported Preston hospital had the WORST  wait time in England of over one hour for patients in ambulances outside its A&E.

So where do we go from here? There's little accountability in the present NHS system. Following the route of Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) only accelerates the NHS as a market and will remove any accountability that's left. 

All the signs were there

In 2015 the Lancashire trust were told not to build a multi-storey car park they had planned because STPs were in place to attempt to reduce hospital attendances.

If they could pull off the plan of selling off hospital services and moving them into communities run by public private ventures they wouldn't need the multi-storey car park; saving the trust £millions in the process. So what's the plan?

It makes one wonder if building the urgent care centre at the side of Chorley hospitals A&E was a ploy for it to eventually replace the A&E?

It follows the same reasoning as the car parking, and it fulfills the criteria for meeting the STP plans readying for corporate take-over of the NHS.




God bless the NHS, it's all we have left, all other public services are gone.
We must fight hard, and never surrender what's rightfully ours.

Politicians are not having this one. This one's ours...