Former minister backs our fight (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

Former minister backs our fight

A FORMER Health Minister has called for "heads to be knocked together" to save what is currently provided at Cirencester Hospital.

Sir Richard Needham, who was Tory Minister for Health and Social Security in Northern Ireland in the late 80s, has warned Health Secretary Alan Milburn: "There is understandably wide public disquiet, even anger, at what is being proposed."

Cirencester Hospital, he has suggested, could be the centre for a community hospital based training programme for junior doctors planning to enter general practice.

The training posts, says Sir Richard, whose home is at Somerford Keynes, should be accredited by the Royal College of General Practitioners, rather than the Royal College of Physicians as at present.

Cirencester Hospital, he has told Mr Milburn, would provide: "a very credible and sensible format for other hospitals of similar size to provide sophisticated local services and at the same time act as a training ground."

He told Mr Milburn that local people were being "confronted by two turf wars," one between the Royal Colleges and the other between the East Gloucestershire NHS Trust and the Cotswolds and Vale Primary Care Trust. He went on: "If you and your colleagues can do nothing to ease the problems that the acute hospitals at Cheltenham and Swindon are experiencing, the downgrading of Cirencester Hospital will make matters worse.

"At a time when NHS beds and resources are being stretched it seems ludicrous to downgrade - and perhaps virtually mothball - a hospital with a tremendous local reputation, enviable facilities and 100 beds which have been involved in the provision of acute services to the local population."

A Cirencester woman told The Standard this week that without the actions of a "crash team" at the town's hospital her father would have died.

Margaret Hewett of Blue Quarry Road, said her father was taken to the Cirencester A&E after being taken ill, and was diagnosed as needing urgent life-saving treatment.

"We were told he would not survive the journey to Cheltenham," said Mrs Hewett.

At one point, she said, her father's heart stopped but the Cirencester crash team succeeded in resuscitating him.

"But the point I wish to emphasise is that in the opinion of all the doctors involved my father would not have survived the ambulance journey to Cheltenham."

"Without the A&E facility here in Cirencester, he would have died."

ends