St Helier Hospital Winter 2018

Scroll back through my website and you will find article after article regarding the future of St Helier Hospital. For 18 years, consultation after consultation has been run - at a cost of almost £50 million to the taxpayer - threatening the future of St Helier Hospital.

We've been here before.

You may remember the conference call overheard on a train by a BBC London Reporter in 2015 in which plans to close St Helier Hospital and build a new hospital in Sutton were revealed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-32297664.

Fast forward to 2017 where we heard proposals for all acute hospital services (including major A&E and consultant led maternity services) to be located at just one site: Epsom, St Helier or Belmont (Sutton). A public engagement was run, receiving over 6,000 responses calling for St Helier to remain fully operational on its current site. Unbelievably, these responses were acknowledged, but not been counted. This is even more concerning considering that Freedom of Information requests revealed a distribution of engagement materials across the entire catchment of the Trust, except for the area nearest to the current St Helier Hospital site.

So what's happening now?

St Helier Hospital's future is under serious threat once again. The NHS is running yet another public engagement with the same proposal: moving all acute hospital services to just one site: Epsom, St Helier or Belmont (Sutton). The latest brand name: "Improving Healthcare Together 2020-2030".

History suggests that once a hospital loses acute services, it is the beginning of the end for that hospital.

Moving acute services including major A&E and consultant led maternity services away from St Helier Hospital would literally be moving them away from an area that needs them more, completely going against the purpose of a hospital.

And can you imagine the pressure that St George's Hospital and Croydon University Hospital would be put under if St Helier lost its major A&E?

The public consultation stage of these proposals is expected in Spring 2019. Please check back for updates.

If you have any questions about the future of St Helier Hospital please do not hesitate to contact me at mcdonaghs@parliament.uk or 0207 219 4678.