The £219m promise for St Helier Hospital...

It was an intriguing exchange in the House of Commons when George Osborne filled in for David Cameron at Prime Minister's Question Time and Tom Brake asked him about funding for much-needed upgrades to St Helier Hospital.

Here is the exchange from Hansard:

Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD): The Chancellor will be aware that under the coalition, £219 million was allocated to rebuilding St Helier hospital. Will he restate the commitment to that funding so that we can save St Helier?

Mr Osborne: We did commit to that hospital project, and provided that it continues to represent value for money, which I am pretty clear that it does, we will go on providing that support. What we have done is to commit to the Simon Stevens plan for the national health service—an additional £8 billion of NHS spending —which is something we can only do if we have our public finances in better order and we are growing our economy, which is precisely what we are doing.

In response to George Osborne's rather mealy-mouthed answer, Tom Brake put out the following press release:

Chancellor George Osborne promised that the new government would allocate £219 million to save St. Helier Hospital. He was challenged directly by Tom Brake, MP for Carshalton and Wallington, during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. 

Mr. Osborne pledged to provide funding for St. Helier as long as the hospital “continues to represent value for money.” He said he thinks the hospital is performing well now.

Tom has led a campaign to save St. Helier hospital from harmful budget cuts for years. More than 21,000 local residents have signed his online petition to save the hospital, which can be found at http://www.saveoursthelier.co.uk/save_our_st_helier_petition.

Tom commented,

“I am pleased that Mr. Osborne has promised to stick with the coalition government’s plan to allocate £219 million to St. Helier Hospital. I intend to hold him to his promise. Our community deserves convenient access to essential healthcare services from a quality hospital like St. Helier. Osborne and the Conservative government must now deliver it.”

Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD): The Chancellor will be aware that under the coalition, £219 million was allocated to rebuilding St Helier hospital. Will he restate the commitment to that funding so that we can save St Helier?

Mr Osborne: We did commit to that hospital project, and provided that it continues to represent value for money, which I am pretty clear that it does, we will go on providing that support. What we have done is to commit to the Simon Stevens plan for the national health service—an additional £8 billion of NHS spending —which is something we can only do if we have our public finances in better order and we are growing our economy, which is precisely what we are doing.

Hang on a moment, Tom. Where exactly in George Osborne's response does he actually say the £219m is back on the table? He doesn't. He gives a slippery politician's answer.

Tom, a few things...

1. The £219m was taken off the table in February 2014, as we are sure you are aware.

2. How does this claim that the £219m is promised for St Helier Hospital square up with the £360m in "efficiency savings" that the CCGs are making? The numbers simply do not add up.

3. The CCGs hold the pursestrings here and both you and Mr Osborne voted for the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the very act that created the CCGs. So why are neither of you mentioning the CCGs?

4. Are you putting pressure on the CCGs to rethink the need for the £360m in "efficiency savings"?

5. Given that the Health and Social Care Act 2012 takes responsibility for the NHS away from the Secretary of State for Health and places it in the hands of the CCGs, does George Osborne or Jeremy Hunt have the authority to make promises about funding for individual hospitals?

6. Why are you still linking to your e-petition about St Helier Hospital when it is still addressed to the wrong body, pre-dates the election and nobody seems to know when it will be handed in?

We eagerly await your response, Mr Brake.

Keep Our St Helier Hospital campaigners take to the streets of London!

KOSHH campaigner, Colin Crilly, reports on the peaceful anti-austerity march held in London on Saturday 20 June:

The anti-austerity march in Central London was huge. Estimates of the number of people marching were as high as 200,000 in the media. Amongst these people, there was a high number of NHS campaigners.

KOSHH campaigners, Brian Hennessy, Saleh Mamon and myself represented our campaign. We took turns holding up the KOSHH banner throughout the march. We were able to link up with other NHS campaigners, such as the Lambeth Keep Our NHS Public group. During the march, prominent campaigner and editor of NHS SOS, Dr Jacky Davis took my photo.

 When I arrived at Parliament Square, I saw a fire engine. Sure enough, Steve, who let us use the fire engine for a protest in Sutton last year, was at the wheel. He sent his regards to all KOSHH campaigners and gave me his number in case we want to use the fire engine in future actions.

The rally had high profile speakers, including: Charlotte Church, Owen Jones, Caroline Lucas, Jeremy Corbyn and Russell Brand. At the finale, the crowd was encouraged to go into their communities to continue working hard and spreading the word.

Here are some more photos from the march.

On Wednesday July 8, there will be a further protest against an emergency budget from George Osborne - that is sure to bring more worrying news for our health services. Click here for more information.

Click here to order a copy of Dr Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis's book, NHS SOS.

A victory with the CCGs!

We have achieved a victory this week with the local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs)! The six CCGs which make the big decisions for Epsom and St Helier's health services are grouped together as South West London Collaborative Commissioning (SWLCC).

For a long time, we have asked that the meetings of all six CCGs, which are open to the public, be better advertised. The SWLCC website did not make it easy to find out when the meeting times are for the CCGs and the individual websites for each CCG were not much better. But after much agitation of the SWLCC Twitter account, we are pleased to report that the SWLCC website home page now has direct links to meeting times for all six CCGs.

All you have to do now to find out when the meetings are on is click here and scroll down.

We thank SWLCC for making this small but important change to the website.

It is so important that information about meeting times is easy to find and that people are aware of the role of CCGs in our health system.

Our next request is for at least half the meetings of the CCGs be held in the evenings to allow more people to attend. At present, meetings are generally held in office hours which makes it impossible for many working people to attend. If the CCGs could look at addressing this issue in the interests of transparency, that would be much appreciated.

Additionally, we have been disappointed but not entirely surprised that local MPs have not been vocal on issues of transparency with CCGs. We urge all MPs to attend CCG meetings whenever possible, or to send representatives to ask questions on their behalf when they cannot make it because of other commitments. This is where the big decisions are being made about Epsom and St Helier Hospitals so it is vital they are well informed and challenge CCGs on how our money is spent.



Image by Piotr Siedlecki

Letters to the editor this week: Broken promises and quality GP care

It has never been easier to write letters to newspapers in this era of email. As such, we urge all our supporters to get their voices heard this way and via the comments sections on newspaper websites. Get involved in the discussions!

This week, there are a couple of good letters in the local newspapers that deserve to be shared widely. David Murray, a great campaigner for our local hospitals, has challenged MPs, Paul Scully (Conservative, Sutton and Cheam) and Tom Brake (Liberal-Democrat, Carshalton and Wallington), on the broken promise about the £219 million upgrade for St Helier Hospital.

Click here to read his letter in the Sutton Guardian in full.

Another good letter was written by P. Hibberd of Carshalton reminding us that we are fortunate to have access to good GP services in our local area. The writer is a patient at the Beeches Surgery, which fell short in a quality inspection.

Click here to read the letter in the Sutton Guardian in full.

Media coverage update: The latest on the Sutton Hospital site and Epsom-St Helier infection rates

This week, it was revealed in the Sutton Guardian that a planned school for the old Sutton Hospital site won't be built on the Sutton Hospital site. Instead, it is planned for Rose Hill. This seems to be in keeping with the "preferred option" as per the "traingate" leak for the Sutton Hospital site to be used for a new 800-bed hospital, at the expense of Epsom and St Helier Hospitals.

Click here to read the story.

It was also revealed this week that Epsom and St Helier Hospitals have not met infection targets. In 2014-15, there were seven cases of MRSA when the target was zero, and 42 cases of Clostridium Difficile (C-Diff), when the target was no more than 40. KOSHH does not believe that such figures should be used as stick with which to beat the hospitals and, thus, lead to demands for closures. However, it would be good to see figures on infection rates to see if the increase correlates with the use of private cleaning companies rather than NHS staff.

Click here to read the story.

Two screenings of the powerful Sell Off Film coming up!

Sell Off, an independent documentary will be screened twice in the next week at two south London locations.

Tonight - that's Wednesday 10 June - the film will be screened at 7.30pm at the Gorringe Park pub, which handily has its own cinema.

The address is 29 London Rd, Tooting, SW17 9HW. It's right next to Tooting Railway Station, between Amen Corner & Figges Marsh. After the film, there will be time for a discussion.

Click here for more information.

And next Monday, 15 June, Sell Off will be screened at 7pm sharp at Balham Baptist Church, 21 Ramsden Road, Balham, SW12 8QX. It is opposite the library and a five-minute walk from Balham Station. The buses 155, 355, 249, 255 will also get you there. Guest speakers will be on hand at this screening as well.

Click here for more information.

Here is some more information about the film.

We have a window poster!

If you'd like a window poster, please get in touch with us. You can tweet us at @Save_St_Helier or find us here on Facebook.

Welcome to the official online home of the KOSHH campaign

It has been a long time coming but at last it is here - the official blog of the Keep Our St Helier Hospital (KOSHH) campaign - the campaign to keep St Helier Hospital open with all its services intact. We also recognise the importance of keeping Epsom Hospital open. Our end of London and Surrey needs both hospitals to be run properly, funded properly and for both sites to receive much-needed upgrades to meet the needs of our communities in the 21st Century and beyond.

Our local hospitals are under threat again

We have fought many battles over the past few years and we thought we might get some rest when the Better Services, Better Values programme - which threatened services such as A&E, maternity and renal - was kicked into the long grass. How wrong we were. Just before the election, the now-infamous "traingate" leak happened - the BBC broke the story of consultants overheard on a train to Waterloo discussing plans to close Epsom and St Helier Hospitals and open a so-called "super hospital" at the site of the old Sutton Hospital. That would be the Sutton Hospital that has been gradually closing down in recent years.

But apart from ripping away two hospitals, strategically located to serve people in our area, the "super hospital" would not be so super at all. According to the leak, it would have 800 beds - a reduction in the number of beds for the area. We have no details on exactly what services would be on offer, whether these services would be publicly run or farmed out to private companies, how much this would all cost, how much has been spent on private consultancy firms already, and whether any costings have even begun to factor in things like the massive road and public transport upgrades that would be required for the Sutton proposal to become a reality.

We need to lobby the CCGs. But what are CCGs?

We met with the Epsom-St Helier Trust CEO, Daniel Elkeles, a few months ago in good faith. At no point was the Sutton proposal mentioned. We find it very hard to believe he wouldn't have known anything about it when we met with him. This is very disappointing indeed.

But it is the Clinical Commissioning Groups - known as CCGs - that hold the pursestrings. Ever since the Health and Social Care Act 2012 was passed at Westminster, these groups, made up of clinicians, are the ones making the big decisions about how our money is spent and how our health services are provided. These groups need to be lobbied hard and held accountable.

Neither our MPs, local councillors, the Health Secretary or Daniel Elkeles are in a position to guarantee the security of our services. This is why we urge MPs and local councillors to attend CCG meetings whenever they can, as well as members of the public.

Of course, finding the times of CCG meetings is difficult and this is something else that needs to be changed. What we do know is they are almost always held during office hours, which makes it hard for many people to attend. This also needs to change.

What do we want?

In light of the leak about a possible hospital on the Sutton site at the expense of Epsom and St Helier Hospitals, we need to know whether Sutton Council can dispose of this land for other purposes, such as education or affordable housing. This is urgent.

We are calling for proper investment in both Epsom and St Helier Hospitals so they can continue to provide the vital services we all depend on. Cutting vital services such as A&E, maternity, renal and the children's hospital will impact on us all and overburden St Georges Hospital in Tooting, a hospital that, like Epsom and St Helier, is doing great work but in very trying circumstances.

We want our money to be spent wisely. We are deeply concerned about the impact of outsourcing services, such as facilities management and non-emergency ambulances, to the private sector. The increased use of agency nurses - which costs a fortune - instead of properly employing nurses on a permanent basis is another serious issue that needs to be addressed.

We do not want our money wasted on yet another consultancy that is a re-run of Better Services, Better Value - only this time, entire hospital closures are the real risk.

The road ahead

We have a lot to do. We have a big fight ahead of us. This blog will be a place where you can find out more about the KOSHH campaign, ways you can help fight to keep our hospitals open and upcoming events. Feel free to comment at the end of the blog posts. We welcome open discussion.

KOSHH has members from a range of backgrounds, we are not a political party and we are not a front for any other political party.

Feel free to share this blog with family and friends. All posts are open to the public for comments. Constructive comments and debate are welcome.