NHS responds to Dr Phillip Lee's 'super hospital' proposal

2:00pm Friday 13th July 2012 in Health By Lawrence Dunhill

NHS responds to 'super hospital' proposal NHS responds to 'super hospital' proposal

NHS chiefs in Bucks have responded to radical plans from a Berkshire MP to build a ‘super hospital’ within 20 minutes of High Wycombe.

Dr Phillip Lee, Conservative MP for Bracknell, has produced a 66-page report which calls for a ‘Royal Thames Valley Hospital’ to be built at Junction 8/9 of the M4 motorway (see related links).

This would mean Wycombe patients travelling up to the Handy Cross roundabout, and then south along the A404 dual carriageway.

Dr Lee sent the report to Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust [BHT], which runs the county’s hospitals, as well as GPs in the Chiltern Clinical Commissioning Group.

BHT said in a statement: “The Trust was approached a few months ago to provide one piece of information related to the physical size of Marlow Hospital, which we duly provided.

“However we have not had any other contact regarding Dr Lee’s proposal, other than a copy of his final report being sent to us.

“We believe that Buckinghamshire should have a strong, independent hospital available within the county – and we are confident that we can offer this through the network of services we provide across Wycombe, Stoke Mandeville and our other hospital sites.”

Dr Lee says his proposals are “very realistic” and the consultancy firm Deloitte published a report in the 1980s which made similar proposals for the region.

He is set to meet leading GPs and is in the process of securing a debate in the House of Commons on the issue of hospital centralisation.

NHS Buckinghamshire & Oxfordshire Cluster, which has been leading a major reorganisation of services in Bucks in recent months, said it was not aware of the proposals.

Related links

This organisation currently decides how health funding is spent, but is set to be disbanded by 2014 when GPs take over this role.

Medical director Dr Geoff Payne said: “We were not aware in Buckinghamshire of Dr Lee’s work and have had no requests for information from him.

“Had he been in contact, we would have been able to discuss our clinical thinking in Buckinghamshire.

“As part of Better Healthcare in Bucks, we considered the development of a new hospital but did not pursue this option because the strategic direction is to create more care in the community and closer to home and because of financial constraints, given that our hospital sites all have PFI buildings on them which still incur significant costs.

“With Dr Lee’s plans, we would also be concerned about the possible impact on the provision of acute services in Buckinghamshire. Given that we have not had an opportunity to discuss these issues with Dr Lee, we would welcome a meeting with him to explore this further.”

Comments (2)

2:07pm Fri 13 Jul 12

motco says...

Don't hold your breath...
Don't hold your breath... motco

12:21pm Sat 14 Jul 12

Joe Ordinary says...

We have the configuration of hospitals across the UK as a result of reaction to circumstances existing at the time that these hospitals were built including the medical technology available at that time. Little or no planning considering needs outside the immediate vacinity of the location where the hospital was being built was done largely because the state of transport at that time meant that it was not realistic to consider the hospital providing services to those outside of the immediate vacinity.
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Exceptions were Specialist hospitals, e.g. Moorfields Eye Hospital, Gt. Ormond St. Childrens Hospital, etc. Even way back then it was recognised that there was a need to gather specific expertise in centres which ensured that practitioners were able to gain adequate experience of dealing with particular malaises.
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Dr Lee's somewhat random proposal for the construction of a General Hospital at the 8/9 Junction on the M4 suffers from the shortcoming of not being proposed as part of a system which addresses the needs of all of the country, considers the impact of new building on existing services/facitities and which takes into account current and predicted demography (and the malaises associated with that demography) and current and predicted medical technology (and the impact which this will have upon how malaises are best treated).
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Patently Dr Lee's proposal is well-intentioned but it is essential that any new building in the area of the provision of medical facilities be part of a national plan for the the development of medical facilities across the nation. Otherwise we will, again, end up with the 'higgledy, piggledy hotch potch' of medical facility provision which has arisen over past centuries as a result of an absence of planning and co-ordination.
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So when is someone going to put together a national plan for the evolution of medical facility provision from 'where we are now' to 'where we want to be in the future' with an appropriate level of Patient, Carer and the Public Involvement in the decision-making process?
We have the configuration of hospitals across the UK as a result of reaction to circumstances existing at the time that these hospitals were built including the medical technology available at that time. Little or no planning considering needs outside the immediate vacinity of the location where the hospital was being built was done largely because the state of transport at that time meant that it was not realistic to consider the hospital providing services to those outside of the immediate vacinity. - Exceptions were Specialist hospitals, e.g. Moorfields Eye Hospital, Gt. Ormond St. Childrens Hospital, etc. Even way back then it was recognised that there was a need to gather specific expertise in centres which ensured that practitioners were able to gain adequate experience of dealing with particular malaises. - Dr Lee's somewhat random proposal for the construction of a General Hospital at the 8/9 Junction on the M4 suffers from the shortcoming of not being proposed as part of a system which addresses the needs of all of the country, considers the impact of new building on existing services/facitities and which takes into account current and predicted demography (and the malaises associated with that demography) and current and predicted medical technology (and the impact which this will have upon how malaises are best treated). - Patently Dr Lee's proposal is well-intentioned but it is essential that any new building in the area of the provision of medical facilities be part of a national plan for the the development of medical facilities across the nation. Otherwise we will, again, end up with the 'higgledy, piggledy hotch potch' of medical facility provision which has arisen over past centuries as a result of an absence of planning and co-ordination. - So when is someone going to put together a national plan for the evolution of medical facility provision from 'where we are now' to 'where we want to be in the future' with an appropriate level of Patient, Carer and the Public Involvement in the decision-making process? Joe Ordinary

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