UNIONS are furious at the plans to make savage cuts in the NHS in Northern Ireland.
The plan, called ‘Transforming Your Care’, is based on closing hospitals and providing acute health care in far fewer hospitals, closing down many residential care homes and ‘ensuring that more services are provided in the community, closer to people’s homes where possible’.
Under the plans, three per cent of the workforce will be sacked, ‘losing’ 1,600 jobs in the next three to five years.
As part of the plan, acute services will be stripped out of the Causeway Hospital in Coleraine and moved to Derry’s Altnagelvin Hospital, one-and-half hours travel away.
The plan is to close the 24-hour A&E at Coleraine, replacing it with an urgent care centre.
A consultation on the plans ends on 15 January, 2013.
Among the sweeping changes put forward, acute hospitals are to operate in five networks serving a 400,000 population, with 180 hospital beds cut. Minor surgery is to be delivered in GP surgeries.
For patients with mental health and learning disabilities, all long-term institutions will be closed. This could mean that 28 of the current 56 facilities would be removed, with the loss of 750 residential places. There would be just six mental health units in NI.
Those depending on social services will receive direct budgets from which they will be expected to purchase their care. Telemonitoring would be provided for patients with long-term conditions so that they can die at home, under periodic observation.
