As you reported in the BFP last week, BCC’s Health and Adult Social Care Select Committee was due to approve its report on urgent care in Bucks on Tuesday, April 15.

The report concludes “the evidence justifying the provision of a single A&E in the county based at Stoke Mandeville, and an MIIU/ Urgent Care Centre at Wycombe Hospital in the best interests of the county’s residents and their health outcomes to be unarguable”.

Many people will be reassured by this categorical assurance from BCC that the decision to close the Emergency Medical Centre in Wycombe Hospital was the right one. However, it is worth looking closely at this “unarguable evidence”.

The report says there is a balance to be struck between the advantages of centralising emergency services (where it is easier to provide specialist services 24/7) and the disadvantages of patients travelling further to that centre.

Basically you are better off once you reach a specialist centre but you may get worse or die before you get there. Trusts are strongly advised to monitor patient outcomes after centralising to “provide assurance patients travelling further are not experiencing significantly worse results”.

So I looked in the report for the data of patient outcomes before and after centralising A&E at Stoke Mandeville – but I couldn’t find this important data anywhere. The closest I could find was BCC being reassured by NHS representatives “that the benefits were not diminished in Bucks. Ambulance journey times for Wycombe district residents to A&E are only five minutes longer on average than before the 2012 reconfiguration, the ambulance service are not aware of people dying on route to the hospital because of the journey time, and this is not perceived as a major risk by them”.

Did the Select Committee scrutinise this information? Is it really right that average journey times for Wycombe residents to A&E are only five minutes longer than when the A&E was in Wycombe? And did the Select Committee realise that ambulance services are not getting to patients who are critically injured quickly enough?

So whatever the extra length of time it takes to get the patient to A&E, it could be on top of an unacceptable wait for the ambulance. How does the ambulance service know no-one died (or got worse) because of the extra journey time?

Who is monitoring the patient outcomes before and after the changes – and where is the data? How can BCC reassure the public so categorically if it doesn’t bother to scrutinise the evidence rigorously? Does it actually know what scrutiny means?

Linda Derrick, Health Spokesman, Wycombe Labour