Good turnout last night, despite the bad timing and short notice. What were peoples views coming away from the meeting? For my part, I thought the heart doctor was persuasive in his arguments about the need to centralise some services, though having given this more thought since the meeting it seems to me that their proposal for this form of centralisation may well be flawed - however, I can see how they have reached their view. I thought the other two speakers were far less impressive and thoroughly unconvincing. The argument for the location of the centralised facility, even if you accept it is needed in the first place, seems to be rather half-baked - I assume that if they had done the proper research, they would have come to the meeting last night armed with that information. Clearly their data from the Ambulance Service re journey times appears to be flawed, and more worryingly, they dont appear to have tested / sense-checked it (or some of the other advice they have received). It seems that this is the single biggest argument put forward for choosing this location (or at least this one of the four clusters they say they considered), and this seems to be based on inaccurate information. Hopefully they will go away, challenge that data and, if its found to be wrong, re-open their consideration of which site is best. I fear, however, that having pushed the project so far already, and presented it as a done deal in the media, that they have too much to lose by doing that and may be tempted to come up with answers to justify their decision rather than re-examine this thoroughly. Surely its too important an issue for them to be allowed to do that. Id also like to think that there is mileage in them working more closely with Southampton on all this. Clearly for the residents of the region south of Winchester (and maybe even in Winchester), this type of centralised emergency service in Southampton would be more favourable than at the top end of the patch near Basingstoke. They admitted last night that Southampton have serious concerns about these plans, and a joined up plan with them - potentially for enhanced services in Southampton and also in Basingstoke, at the existing locations wherever possible - would make more sense for the region as a whole. But this would require some thinking beyond the limits of just the Hampshire Hospitals Trust...
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 11:48:26 +0000
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