Scant consolation Hampy, but with the proximity of the M62 to you, the journey to Liverpool won't be as painful as some of the more rural located people! Very best wishes to your niece Hampy, hopefully she can make good progress without too much turmoil and upset!
unfortunately Dave the motorway doesn't help much - when she has surgery she will be away for several weeks at a time with her parents incurring great expense and time off work to be by her side (you simply can't leave a three year old in hospital for several weeks without her parents). Meanwhile the other children will need looking after at a time when they will be anxious about their sister and the upheaval. As you can imagine - the next operation Daisy has she has been rated a 40% chance of survival - it's incredibly tense and stressful even having the hospital a half an hours' drive away. For those reasons, unless the decision is reversed I think it's likely the family will relocate.
Hope everything goes alright Hampy, in this day and age the quality service means jackshit its all about the pounds they can save. I deal with a lot of Procurement directors in my job, and the last thing on their mind is the impact to people at the hard end who has to deal with the cheapest and most often worse service, but billy big bollocks in procurement probably gets a nice fat bonus for saving the company money. I deal with a lot of hospitals & PCT's and i know the impact of the budgets are having (some are being slashed by more than 50%!), but the amount of waste in the NHS is scandelous still! yet the first people to suffer is joe public!
in this case it isn't supposed to be about money, it's been a long process that started with the enquiry into the Bristol heart surgery scandal in the 1990s. The idea is supposed to be to have fewer 'centres of excellence' but Leeds will be closing on the basis that the head of the panel has a business interest in one of those centres being at Newcastle. Yesterday we watched for hours as statistics and analysis were bent and even dismissed to paint a picture to support it. Then, insultingly, the delegates were handed a dossier explaining the decision in detail - a decision which was supposed to have been taken just moments before they were handed out!
Amongst the most appalling examples were phrases like 'based on a sample of 75% of respondents from four postcode areas'
Surly, if the person making this decision would benefit from it closing, surly there is a conflict of interest? that alone would be enough to overturn the decision when its the tax payers money.
Guru: this is part of a report from the Royal Brompton Hospital which is also to close. It's not about the chap with an interest in Newcastle but you can see that it's about 'looking after the boys' rather than patient care. Eveyone on that panel had an interest in the outcome. "3.3.2 We have alleged in our court proceedings that the exclusion of anyone from Royal Brompton made the Steering Group process into a “stitch-up”. This is because the Steering Group included a surgeon who is Co-Medical Director at GOSH, a physician who leads at the Evelina and a DGH paediatrician who also works closely with the Evelina team. It is futile to pretend and feign innocence that their institutions did not have a significant vested interest in knocking the Royal Brompton out: the visionary 2009 paper which was signed off by the Boards of both GOSH and RB&HFT, and on which S&S members have just recently purported to rely, notes that GOSH makes a loss of £400,000 pa from paediatric cardiac surgery and respiratory services, whilst the Royal Brompton makes a surplus of £3.7m from this work. The transfer of the Royal Brompton cases would be an enormous fiscal boost to GOSH and Evelina when both are being challenged at a time of NHS fiscal stringency. Furthermore the professional and research status of these organisations and their leading members would be enormously enhanced if the only real professional peer in London were taken out of the equation. The failure of the architects of the S&S process to appreciate this, if that is what happened, is remarkable indeed."
Really sorry to hear about your bad news Yorkie. When I lived in Cambridge I was so thankful to be on the doorstep of the world renowned Addenbrookes Hospital, the best hospital in the country along with Papworth! I had major misgivings about moving down to the toilet called Crawley but I will be back in Cambridgeshire one day. The health service up there is amazing as I know from experience.
Must admit, i had a lot of dealings with on a personal basis with Papworth when my dad went in there for a heart op, which then had complications andhe was in there for over 3 months, they were first class in his aftercare from the cleaner to the top surgeon. these people have my upmost respect and gratitude for everything they did during that time.
