Marshalswick South Focus Team

Councillors, Rod Perks and Allan Witherick working with Andrew Duff MEP and Melvyn Teare for you Learn more

NHS and Labour let us down again

by awitherick on 5 April, 2010

When we lost St Albans A&E and instead got a Minor Injuries Unit local residents felt let down by the NHS and their Tory MP.  Since then the Health service has gone through multiple reconfigurations at an unknown cost to the tax payer.  The latest one sees the merger of West Herts and East & North Herts Primary Care Trusts in to a single Hertfordshire Trust.  It might not seem significant, but that’s another set of redundancies payments.  Imagine what we could’ve done if people weren’t just concentrating on surviving the next reconfiguration…

Many people will recall the great proclamations in 2005 by the local Labour party that we would be getting a new Hospital with A&E services in Hertfordshire.  Just down the road we were supposed to get a state of the art hospital which could be reached easily (regardless of whether the football is on).

Then the Labour Government changed it’s mine.

Back to the Drawing Board 1
So instead the local NHS Trust worked to introduce an Urgent Care Centre, to be run by the private sector on the St Albans City Hospital site.  But when only one company offered to tender they had to cancel the whole process.

Back to the Drawing Board 2

So instead the NHS trust asked St Albans Minor Injuries to go back to the drawing board to create a new proposal.  However this was still deemed to be “..beyond the level of funding we could afford..”

Back to the Drawing Board 3

At the Health Scrutiny meeting at Hertfordshire County Council Cllr Allan Witherick raised the issue directly with the PCT leads because it seems that the every time the NHS have consulted they have ended up using fall back plans- how many more times can this go on?  Local residents need a service NOW.

You can read more comments from Sandy Walkington on his site.

Car parking at the hopsital

Separately a visit to the hospital by Hertfordshire County Councillors demonstrated the frustrations faced every day with parking (I had enough sense to cycle- but not many cycle racks either!).  Removing the parking charges would NOT resolve the issue as the problem is to do with the number of spaces available.  This is likely to only get worse with additional facilities on the St Albans City Hospital site.  It seems our hope for a multi-storey car park has been pushed back yet again as the NHS sums fail to add up.

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