Health-related v fiscal causes for Papworth"s move | @guardianletters

Aneurin Bevan, as minister of overall health in Could 1948, on a pay a visit to to Papworth village hospital. Photograph: Edward G. Malindine/Getty Images

The Treasury’s suggestion that Papworth hospital should be relocated and joined with the loss-generating Peterborough and Stamford NHS Foundation Trust is deeply disturbing and clearly primarily based on fiscal aspirations rather than sound health care considerations (Report, 15 February). When I was appointed consultant cardiothoracic surgeon to Papworth 42 many years in the past, I was informed by the regional medical officer that we’d be moved to the Addenbrooke’s web site inside 4 many years. Events conspired towards this. Nonetheless, after my retirement I served as a non-executive on the Papworth board and, following lengthy discussions with Addenbrooke’s, it was unanimously agreed that we ought to move to its internet site in Cambridge. There we would have our very own constructing and retain our very own management and identity as a separate trust, but would share some expensive solutions that would be employed by the two hospitals.

Our cause for wanting to continue to be independent was since of our success. We had excellent management and, becoming a single-specialty hospital, were capable to target effectively on treating sufferers with heart and lung ailment with no currently being subjected to the demands and pressures of becoming component of a big basic hospital. We had been in agreement that each hospitals would advantage from the proximity of our respective clinical services and, for Papworth, the presence of planet-class analysis-based organisations and the health-related college on the identical campus have been additional points of interest. This still has to be the greatest alternative for the individuals of East Anglia and for these who attend our supra-regional services from more afield. It is intolerable that this should be put at risk by this late intervention from the Treasury.
Terence English
Oxford

• The real iniquity linked with the Papworth hospital PFI bid is not with Mr Osborne’s choice to reject it but the rush to PFI by successive governments, saddling the nation with massive debt. The NHS is a publicly funded physique, bound by statute to provide healthcare free at the stage of delivery from taxpayer’s money. Implicit within this need to be the provision of hospitals and services for the delivery of that care. Alternatively of wasting vast quantities of funds on foreign expeditions, our politicians ought to be prioritising care for our very own population very first. This ought to consist of the developing of modern day hospitals for the delivery of state-of-the art healthcare for our folks.

Papworth has been at the forefront of cardiothoracic surgical procedure and medicine for half a century and is recognised around the globe as a leading institution. It is a jewel in the NHS crown and however visitors from other countries are appalled at the amenities inside which this function has to be carried out. To result in years of delay in its rebuilding on the Cambridge University hospitals campus (a single of the greatest and most sophisticated in the planet), its rightful website in the 21st century, demonstrates practically nothing if not political blindness to the relevance of the scientific developments in medicine.

For a mere £150m, the United kingdom would be delivered of a fine state-of-the-art facility that individuals and staff deserve. There can be minor doubt that the populace, whose taxes need to be utilised appropriately, would support this kind of a move. After all, if a new cardiothoracic institute can be built with one hundred% government funding at a previously unrecognised website this kind of as Basildon, certainly it must be shamed into funding this worthy venture. PFI-developed projects price the taxpayer a issue of 3 to 4 times the expense in excess of a 30-12 months period and, at the finish of it, the builders retain control. Hundreds of thousands of lbs are being poured into the pockets of developers , with additional income streams generated for them by the excessive operating charges of these institutions that they management.
Francis Wells
Advisor cardiothoracic surgeon, Papworth hospital

• I can empathise with Stephen Bridge, the chief executive of Papworth, and his anxiety in excess of its long term, but I consider he is getting naive on at least 3 counts. 1st, the good quality and levels of health-related services and care are determined by the teams of clinicians and help personnel, not the location or the identify on the door of the hospital. Second, he raises the question of the financial troubles dealing with the Peterborough hospital triggered largely by its PFI debt, but in the very same breath says Papworth would be raising £80m by way of that same facility. PFI schemes have been one of the greatest sources of fiscal problems to beset the NHS in current many years. Third, he argues that place in the Cambridge biomedical campus is vital. Given the services of contemporary communications and the proximity of Peterborough to Cambridge – only 30 miles – it is challenging to accept this as a powerful argument.

Having served for 10 years as a patient governor on the councils of both Moorfields and now University University London, I am well aware of the rewards of hospitals becoming a component of academic health science centres, as I am also of the difficulties of financing the creating of new hospitals and the use of PFI to do so. Moorfields is dealing with a move to a substitute facility and UCLH utilised a PFI loan for its Euston Street premises. Stephen Bridge would do nicely not to confuse “NHS politics” with financial probity.
John Bird
London

• It could be amusing, have been it no so wretched and destructive, to point out that the achievable “shotgun partnership” of Papworth hospital (“at the forefront of healthcare innovation”) with Peterborough and Stamford NHS foundation believe in (“the NHS’s most reduction-making foundation trust”) would be a stark illustration of the fallacy of the 2nd accident, popularly recognized as a “secundum quid”.

Jeremy Hunt has it in his secretary of state’s electrical power to nip this in the bud and insist that Papworth must realise its move, ten many years in the arranging, to the 310-bed hospital in the Cambridge biomedical campus, subsequent door to Addenbrooke’s, the place Roy Calne pioneered liver transplantation and considerably far more. In this predicament, the Division of Wellness ought to stick to its choice to back Papworth’s move and tell Hunt to inform the Treasury to get lost. If the Treasury decides against and Hunt offers in, then Papworth will drown and decades of British and international healthcare transplant care and advance will be issues of background and, however yet again, the fallacy of the second accident will have prevailed.
Bruce Ross-Smith
Oxford

Health-related v fiscal causes for Papworth"s move | @guardianletters