When the decision was announced that Stafford Hospital’s A&E department would be closed overnight, campaigner Diana Smith started a petition against the move, and to support the hospital after a tumultuous couple of years. In this guest post for A Little Bit of Stone, Diana explains why everyone in the borough should be offering their support.
The health service is beginning to change. At the moment all we have are pieces of the jigsaw. We do not know how they fit together. No-one knows what the picture will look like.
Rumours of Accident and Emergency at Stafford closing or being downgraded have been around for months, and were always immediately denied by management, the MP, the hospital pressure group, and the press. This time there was no doubt. This was not a matter of reconfiguration or of cost cutting.
The partial closure, 10pm to 8am, which will take effect on 1st December, has been triggered because the reputational damage to the hospital, the cumulative effect of four years of repetitive bad press has made it virtually impossible for the hospital to attract and keep enough A&E consultants for the Care Quality Commission to be confident that it is always safe.
I am told by the MP that A&E consultants are in short supply, and have certainly heard from the emergency specialist who gave evidence to the Mid Staffs Inquiry that many small hospitals throughout the country struggle to keep their A&Es adequately staffed. Many are just about coping.
With all this as a background it is not surprising that the hospital has on a number of occasions gone through the appointments process, appointed someone, only for them to back out later. The theory that many give is that once they start searching Google, they see the intolerable personal pressure that individual staff have experienced, and decide to give it a miss.
Knowing that A&E will close, my first feeling was that people needed to know. We needed to know what people think, and we needed to apply pressure to ensure that the full re-opening after three months does in fact happen.
I decided to launch the online petition – which I did initially purely under my own name, though it later got adopted by the Labour Party, and cloned by the Conservative Party and the newly formed Support Stafford Hospital group. The paper petition followed.
After that things moved rapidly. By the end of the first three days there were over 3,000 signatures, and by the end of 10 days there were 8,000. There’s now more than 10,000 and there are about 70 different collection points with people busily collecting more signatures. This is now their petition!
The simple fact is that people want to sign. Whether at street stalls or outside the bingo hall, the car boot sale, the bowling club, nurseries, schools, sheltered housing, games shops, colleges, shops, pubs, community centres, doctors’ surgeries. Wherever you go there are people that this decision affects, and they want to say this is our hospital, this matters to us. Find a solution.
When the crisis of the Health Care Commission in 2009 occurred this was a terrible time for the town. It divided people right down the middle. This time there is no division. The threat is real, virtually everyone can see how damaging this would be to the wellbeing of the people and the status of the town.
People who have always had good experiences see that it is time to speak out, and what is much more brave, some of the people who have on occasions had bad experiences have come forward and said that the answer is to improve the hospital, not to downgrade it.
We have recognised that we value our hospital. The town has come together over this. The press have played a positive role in helping this to happen, and the political parties, if not hand in hand, are at least walking side by side.
So are we out of the woods? No! Not by a long stretch. If we are to overturn the reputational problems of the hospital we will need to find a journalist to champion the cause of telling the complex story that lies behind the stories we have heard so often.
Support Stafford Hospital – which has not yet even had its first meeting – has the potential to become the permanent public support group that the hospital will need to “be on its side” through any difficulties that lie ahead, and we need to remember that all of this is taking place in a background of job cuts and growing demand.
The borough’s newfound interest in its health service may make it possible to save the A&E and to build the kind of services we will need for the next 30 years. I hope so!
https://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-stafford-hospital.html
https://supportstaffordhospital.co.uk/
2 comments
Craig
Excellent article and work, Diana! Do you have a Facebook, Bebo, and Twitter page? As you say, everyone’s affected by the restricted openings at SGDH, and exposure of the story to the younger audience <30 might garner a huge additional interest in the developments.
Good luck with your continued efforts!
Jamie Summerfield
Hi Craig. Diana’s on Twitter (@mulberrybush) where she’s been promoting the campaign heavily!