Many hospitals will have to shut their A&E units, children’s departments and surgical units to help the NHS fill a £20bn black hole, leaders of the medical profession have said.
In a letter to The Guardian, the senior doctors tell the main political parties that whoever forms the next government must be ready to press ahead with widespread rationalisation of hospital services which, although unpopular, would improve care and save patients’ lives.
Signatories include large sections of the medical establishment - nine of the 14 medical royal colleges, and three related medical faculties - including bodies representing GPs, hospital doctors, experts in childbirth and maternal care and specialists in children’s medicine as well as psychiatrists, anaesthetists and public health experts. Their public support for “large-scale” closures of hospital units is significant because together they speak on behalf of about two-thirds of all doctors.
The letter, which was organised by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the colleges’ professional association, says: “If the NHS is to cope with the financial pressures it is going to face under any government without resorting to indiscriminate and damaging service and staffing cuts, large-scale planned service redesign and reconfiguration based on clinical evidence will have to be at the heart of the strategy. This may mean, for example, A&Es, children’s departments and surgical units at their local hospital either closing or providing a different type of service.”
Sir David Nicholson, the NHS’s chief executive, has said the service must make £20bn of “efficiency savings” between next year and 2014.
Centralising services which are currently provided at many hospitals, such as stroke and trauma care and heart surgery, would improve the quality of care and patients’ outcomes because medics would handle larger numbers of cases, the doctors say in their letter.
Read more at The Guardian.
Tags: Reconfiguration
