PRESS STATEMENT 17 February 2003

West Cornwall HealthWatch
Annual General Meeting
Friday 14th March 2003, 7pm
Committee Room No 1
Penwith District Council Offices
St Clare Penzance
(rear of building, overlooking St. Clare Field)

All Supporters welcome
to elect committee for 2003-4, to receive the accounts, and to receive reports of the year's activities.

"REBRANDED, NOT UPGRADED"

West Cornwall HealthWatch, the local voluntary health watchdog organisation which monitors developments in the NHS, has responded to last week's article in The Cornishman "Hospital on fast track to upgrade" , which announced the decision to make West Cornwall Hospital the first of eight "Diagnostic and Treatment Centres" (DTCs) in the county.

Co-ordinator Marna Blundy remarked wryly: "What this scheme is doing is less providing a new service than re-branding an existing one. West Cornwall Hospital already provides day surgery, extensive outpatient clinics, pathology and X-ray facilities - it's been doing all these for years! What we need to realise, however, is that DTCs do not cater either for in-patients or Accident and Emergency patients. Although the statement suggests that the plan will be to build on to the existing hospital, it is not clear whether West Cornwall Hospital would have to lose inpatient beds in order to accommodate the extended outpatient and day case services. Readers will recall that this was precisely what was proposed in the original, widely discredited, West of Cornwall Primary Care Trust's Consultation Document. We would certainly not wish to return to those ideas!

Naturally we welcome the about-turn statement by RCHT's press office that "big is not always best, and that it is better all round to take the treatment to the patients." This community has always known that, and it marched nearly a year ago in support of local care for local patients. In HealthWatch's "People's Option" document (March 2001), we stated that Treliske was a "prime example that big is neither beautiful, nor effective, nor efficient."

However, we must be aware that DTCs will NOT mean local care for everyone. The plans still leave Treliske as the only A&E department in the county. Yet the Community Health Council stated last year that Cornwall needed more than one A&E Department. Unless and until more emergency and in-patient services are decentralised, much NHS treatment will NOT be taken to the patients.

We frankly fail to see how introducing more day surgery and outpatient appointments will improve A&E waiting times at Treliske. That is perhaps the biggest issue of all. Mike Coupe, the Director of Planning and Performance Management for the RCHT, admitted last week that "if you don't bring the people of this county with you, you have done it wrong." We challenge him to do it right this time, to stop trying to bring the people of the county to an overloaded site at Treliske and to upgrade West Cornwall Hospital properly - to the status it and its people deserve, as a second DGH (District General Hospital), not a mere DTC."

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Co-ordinator: Marna Blundy, 4 Botallack Moor, St Just, PENZANCE, Cornwall TR19 7QH
Tel / Fax 01736 788107
Email: westcornwallhealthwatch@yahoo.co.uk