Your vote might count
I attended the ‘Save Ludlow Hospital’ meeting on November 9th and very good it was too, the organisers deserve much praise and thanks from all the people of Ludlow and the surrounding area.
When Philip Dunne spoke at the end of the meeting, in general it was uninspiring – having started by saying that he was there ‘as your MP not as Health Minister’, it turned out that he couldn’t, as MP, tell himself, as Health Minister, what to do and could only work ‘behind the scenes’.
He did make one point I remember, which was that the many delays to Future Fit (acute hospital ‘reconfiguration’) were because of previous poor management by the CCG and, now that the CCG has better managers decision will not be delayed.
This is, at best, only partly true. The delays all happened because NHS England threw out the plans put forward by the CCG and, although unsaid, the reasons were that the plans did not save enough money. Even under the new ‘better’ management there has just been a three week delay in presentation of the latest version because NHSE had some reservations.
This version might get through but not from the better management of the CCG but from better placement of ‘managers’ into the CCG by NHSE, aka the government.
The organisers of last Thursday’s meeting know only too well the shortcomings – cruel jokes about equipment on wheels thrown in, it seems – and fixation on costs of the ‘better’ CCG management and their advisers.
Negotiation with these people will never work, citizens need to take the democratic, political route of threatening to hold local and national politicians to account in the only way left open to them: in the voting booth.
John Higson, Craven Arms
