At their first Auutmn meeting members of Hands Off Hinchingbrooke voted unanimously to continue monitoring the situation not only in Huntingdon but across the county as the cuts and closures begin to impact this winter.
Having attended Clinical Commissioning Group meetings, Health Scrutiny Committee and various other meetings over the summer, the group are under no illusion that services will be changed as they have been in other areas of East Anglia and nationwide.
The campaigners have decided it’s their duty to talk to local councils, MPs and NHS staff to find out more about the status of the 24 A&E Dept and changes to the entire hospital if it is downgraded.
Particular concerns were
- the lack of mental health facilities in Huntingdonshire even though Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group say that mental health is a priority
- little or no evidence of more community nursing teams that are supposed to be created for the “care closer to home” policy outlined in the Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) proposals
and, perhaps most worrying of all, is that the final STP, complete with details of cuts, changes to wards and workforce, still has not been published for the public. Why not?
Hands Off Hinchingbrooke are making direct enquiries to find out more and are urging the public to contact them if they experience changes to services at Hinchingbrooke and across the region.
Secretary, Lorna Mansbridge said: “The campaign team decided we would continue to fight to save NHS services for Huntingdonshire. Everything is subject to the county wide STP and also instructions from NHS England. We know from other campaigners around the country that NHS England wants to shrink services and our county will not be allowed to have 3 blue-light A&E departments. We have at least three new towns being built in the region and the idea of closing or reducing emergency services is absurd, not to say dangerous.”
Hands Off Hinchingbrooke members all agreed that it was very likely that Cambridgeshire would begin to see alarming changes this autumn and winter as NHS England deadlines to finalise hospital reconfigurations and changes to health service structures came closer.
Currently NHSE is demanding that the STP find £504million in what it calls “efficiency savings” and what Hands Off Hinchingbrooke call “excessive cuts”.
For more information about the status of the NHS in Cambridgeshire contact:
Cambs County Council Health Board
Cambridgeshire Combined Authority
To make your views known contact Healthwatch