The revelation by the Health Service Journal that the plan for reconfiguring hospital services in Greater Manchester has been “quietly dropped” – must raise questions over other plans across England that involve centralising services and downgrading hospitals.
The long-running, costly and controversial Healthier Together project was launched in 2014, seeking to centralise surgical specialties and emergency care on fewer sites while insisting that no hospitals would actually close.
The plan was to reduce the number of hospitals delivering high risk surgery from 10 to just four (Manchester Royal Infirmary, Salford, Stockport, and Oldham) with services downgraded at North Manchester, Wythenshawe, Tameside, Bolton, and Wigan – posing complex problems of access and the need for substantial expansion of beds and staff at the new specialist centres.
It was subject to a 15-week public consultation in 2015, and subsequently challenged in court by doctors at Wythenshawe Hospital angry at the loss of specialist activity who sought a judicial review – without success.
But the plan and the 2016 Sustainability and Transformation Plan were both effectively subsumed in the “Taking Charge” devolution process that allocated a combined budget £6 billion to cover health and social care in the whole of Greater Manchester from April 2016.
Now the Healthier Together website which displayed the initial consultation document and additional information appears to have been closed, and a search for ‘Healthier Together’ on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority website yields only links to Taking Charge.
The decision to axe the Manchester plan after millions have been spent on consultancy and huge amounts of management time have been allocated to it echoes the top-level decision by NHS England to kill off the shambolic and costly Shaping a Healthier Future plan for North West London two years ago.
That plan, which threatened to axe acute services at Charing Cross and Ealing Hospitals, cost upwards of £72 million in consultancy fees – but never completed a business case, as its projected cost mushroomed above £1 billion.
Other areas still facing similarly ill-conceived schemes will be encouraged by this latest retreat to redouble the pressure on local MPs and councils to press for a full re-evaluation of the viability and affordability of the plans and their impact on local communities.
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