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| Written by Gordon Prentice | ||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 07 December 2010 23:02 | ||||||||||||||||||
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I see that Conservative MPs David Davis, Lee Scott and Julian Lewis will vote against the Government on Thursday. I am keeping my fingers crossed they will be joined by others such as Pendle’s Andrew Stephenson, who told students before the election that his anger over the imposition of tuition fees in 1999 drove him into party politics. There is boiling resentment about politicians who say one thing to get elected and then do the polar opposite. Watching Chris Huhne, in his polished and earnest manner, argue the case for scrapping tuition fees is, frankly, nauseating. Huhne is yet another actor/politician of the type that infests Westminster. Still, let’s be positive. His views are on the record and cannot be airbrushed away in future, unlike his infamous “Calamity Clegg” document. It seems to have disappeared completely from cyberspace. Getting A&E back to Burnley General Burnley’s Lib Dem MP, Gordon Birtwistle, got into Parliament last May on the back of a specific pledge to re-instate the accident and emergency department at Burnley General Hospital which was downgraded to an urgent care centre in November 2007. Since the election there has been some ineffectual huffing and puffing by Birtwistle. But it took the intervention of Ian Woolley, the independent and widely respected former chair of the Blackburn Health Authority, to persuade Birtwistle to table some Parliamentary questions to find out how things are progressing. Woolley and my old friend Peter Pike both want the A&E designation re-instated, as I do. Their determination to make this happen was given a huge boost earlier this year when Professor Matthew Cooke, the National Clinical Director of Emergency and Urgent Care, and his colleague, Dr Irving Cobden, published a report recommending major changes to Burnley’s UCC which, they say, was operating at under capacity. Cooke held out the possibility of re-badging the Burnley urgent care centre. The name of urgent care centre does not reflect the work currently being undertaken compared to other centres called A&E and urgent care centres and there is a need for consistency and clarity in both nomenclature and service provision. The report goes on: There is work underway nationally to better define what is available at the variety of urgent care services and their nomenclature. Yet, in her brush-off to Birtwistle, Health Minister, Anne Milton, makes no reference to the work being undertaken nationally. She insists there is no National Nomenclature Review Panel without revealing in detail what is happening. She says obscurely: “Some work is being carried out by NHS North West and NHS South West to create a common offer to ease navigation of the urgent and emergency care system for patients.” Birtwistle should be affronted by Milton’s waffly non answer. Fortunately, there are documents from the NHS East Lancashire which report on the progress of implementing the Cooke Cobden recommendations, including the nomenclature issue. These can be uploaded here. After all his public posturings and candlelight vigils, Birtwistle is toast at the next election if he doesn’t get Burnley’s A&E back.  Tags:
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 09 December 2010 08:37 |
