Chase Farm Hospital Accident & Emergency and Maternity departments must close, the government’s emergency services tsar Professor George Alberti has said.
Save Chase Farm campaigners in Enfield, north London, have been shocked by Alberti’s report which claims the closures are clinically justified.
An angry Save Chase Farm Councillor Kate Wilkinson said yesterday that Chase Farm was being treated as an experiment in downgrading hospitals and replacing them with polyclinics for the rest of the country.
She warned: ‘Once these changes have been made we will be left without a hospital as they will be irreversible.
‘Nowhere is there a scrap of clinical evidence that downgrading Chase Farm will be good for the people of Enfield.’
Announcing his report the ‘Review of Clinical Case for Change’ at Enfield Primary Care Trust head office, Alberti said: ‘Immediate care around the clock by experienced clinicians cannot be guaranteed while efforts are made to maintain all three sites (Chase Farm, North Middlesex and Barnet) as full acute hospitals.’
His report proposes emergency services are cut down to 16 hours a day and Chase Farm becomes a privately-run ‘polyclinic’.
With A&E and maternity services to be closed at Chase Farm, he said there will ‘need to be a little souping up of the Barnet (Hospital) facilities’.
Alberti added that the North Middlesex PFI scheme also ‘will have to take this into account’.
He stressed that the planned Chase Farm cuts are the pattern for the rest of the country.
He said: ‘We are developing a model which could well be used in other areas because healthcare is changing with the rapidity of advances in medicine.’
Speaking in a personal capacity, consultant surgeon Anna Athow told News Line yesterday: ‘As expected, George Alberti is recommending exactly what the Primary Care Trust has been pushing for over the last nine months.
‘This is the closure of Chase Farm as a district general hospital and the closure of a proper A&E.
‘The whole of the working class of north London has got to resist this.
‘The trade unions must hold urgent meetings and we need to build up our Council of Action to mobilise direct action to defend the hospital.’
The Council of Action has a policy of defending NHS hospitals by all means necessary, including occupations.
