THE Judicial Review into the closure of Chase Farm’s Hospital A&E began yesterday morning.
Enfield council is seeking the quashing of the closure decision. Andrew Arden QC for Enfield council said that the council wasn’t contesting the closure of Chase Farm Maternity and Paediatrics just the A&E.
He told the court: ‘We are calling for a full A&E, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week in what is one of the most deprived areas in London.
Arden stressed that Alberti’s review in 2007 had said ‘there was a strong clinical case for reconfiguration’ and recommended closing Chase Farm A&E and replacing it with a 12-hours A&E and then an urgent care centre.
The review also suggested that ‘local services should be strengthened as an urgent priority before hospital changes’.
Arden continued: ‘This is not about new services being established but improving primary care in what is a deprived area of London’.
He went on to explain that in 2007 there were only two neighbourhood care centres in Edmonton – ‘Forest Grove and Evergreen, and that is all we still have’.
Arden told the court that ‘The full business case was never published’ and that ‘Barnet, Enfield and Haringey clinical strategy included the movement of resources into the community’.
At this point Arden stressed: ‘We have always opposed the closure of the A&E but we know the limits of the law’.
He said: ‘You can’t expect to improve primary care as the result of savings made by closing hospitals.
‘That’s nonsense, people need somewhere to go to.
‘You can’t close hospital services without the primary care in place.’
Arden added: ‘In practice we have a large community which still relies on the A&E.’
And he went on to give examples from the consultations stressing that there was not the improved primary care promised or the financial resources to allow that.
Commenting on the re-configuration panel’s advice to the Labour Secretary of Health in July 2008, he quoted it as saying that planned developments ‘must be in place before any services are moved out of a hospital’.
On the Enfield primary care strategy review of 2009 he said it had designated that ‘it was imperative’ that primary care be improved and expanded, and it concluded that over 50 per cent of practices in Enfield were below standard and that Enfield as a whole was behind the rest of the country.
The decision is expected today
• On Day 458 of the Chase Farm hospital picket workers and residents stressed that they fully supported an occupation to stop the closure of the A&E and Maternity Departments.