A passionate resident has criticised a local hospital for the continued cutting of services.
Michele Martin, a dedicated campaigner and organiser of Save Ormskirk and Southport Hospitals, took it upon herself to organise a protest outside Southport Hospital after she claims the hospital is losing a range of services as well as blasting what she claims to be a wider healthcare shake-up up and down the country. Speaking outside the hospital grounds on Town Lane, she attacked hospital chiefs in a searing rant.
Michele told LancsLive : "Southport has lost children’s A&E, maternity, the therapy pool has gone, physiotherapy has gone, they’ve moved surgery now to St Helens, they’re now talking about closing the stroke unit. As far as the stroke unit is concerned, it’s a real centre of excellence, and Southport is a hotspot for strokes; it’s one of the worst areas for stroke in the whole country."
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Despite these strong claims, Southport and Ormskirk NHS Hospital Trust has denied these claims, with the truth saying that some of these changes occurred years ago and other reports are simply not true. It said that the Children's A&E and maternity services both moved to Ormskirk 20 years ago, the therapy pool is currently awaiting repair, surgery has not changed and physiotherapy outpatients moved to Ormskirk.
In the meantime, plans are currently being considered to move critical stroke care to Aintree but general stroke care would continue at Southport.
The campaigners also criticised changes that will be brought in nationally under the new Health and Care Act 2022 which came in in April and will see the end of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) and the formation of Integrated Care Systems (ICS) which have been described as "partnerships of NHS bodies and local authorities that come together to plan and deliver joined-up health and care services" by NHS England and NHS Improvements. The changes are currently set to come into force on July 1.
New bodies will see Merseyside covered under the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS which will see the end of nine CCGs in the region that the ICS will cover. It will be made up of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), which will plan, budget and arrange the provision of health services, Integrated Care Partnerships (ICPs), which will produce strategies on health and well-being needs, and councils, charities voluntary bodies, local residents, cares and other community partners.
But joining voices blasting wider health care reforms, Michele said: “There will be 42 Integrated Care Boards around the country, and it’s Orwellian, not integrated; we will no longer have a national health system, and the local health care boards will decide what we have and they will be able to put business representatives on the board and make a straightforward decision.
"Those integrated Care Boards will have the power of life and death, so we need to put pressure on them to make sure that their contracts are going to NHS people, and units, not to private units who will then strip things away.
She added: “This new reform has gone through on the quiet. One of the key pieces of legislation was that the NHS logo can be used by anyone who’s a provider, so you’ve got private companies who are running the NHS but they’ve got the NHS logo, which is gaslighting people into thinking that services and staff are NHS when they are private companies.
"In the end, the NHS will be just a logo and a bank account, giving out money to private providers; we won’t have NHS services if they’re allowed to carry on with this. Lives will be lost and are already being lost, as life expectancy was going up steadily year on year for dozens of years, and it has stalled from 2010. There are lots of people now who are dying because they can’t get ambulances and can’t get the operations they need.”
Southport and Ormskirk NHS Hospital Trust managing director Anne-Marie Stretch said: “Everything we do is focused on maintaining services for local people. That is why, over the past 18 months, we have been asking our staff and the public for their views in our Shaping Care Together programme. Like many other NHS organisations we are facing workforce challenges and we are unlikely to be able to continue providing some services on our own. We need the support of the wider NHS to sustain them, which is why we entered a partnership with St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust last autumn."
