Mary Burnett, from Action4Whipps, sets out why the only end-of-life facility in the borough needs to stay
On 16th November, 35 people braved the cold to hand in a petition signed by nearly 6,500 residents to save the Margaret Centre at Whipps Cross hospital; which is the only specialist, in patient, end-of-life unit in Waltham Forest and Redbridge.
In the same week the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which scrutinises the work of the Government, published a damning report about Boris Johnson’s 2019 “40 new Hospitals” pledge. Whipps Cross is one of those hospitals.
The programme to build the new hospitals has been dogged by uncertainty, delays and such a squeeze on funding that the need to keep costs down has pretty much trumped everything else. And this has put both the Margaret Centre and the viability of our new hospital at risk. It is no accident; we’ve had a decade of governments underfunding the NHS while promoting an increased reliance on the private sector.
The 40 hospitals have been divided into groups. Whipps Cross is in a group of eight so-called “Pathfinders”, or guinea pigs, for a standardised, off-site method of construction called Hospital 2.0, which is largely untested in the hospital sector.
The model for Hospital 2.0 services – a “minimum viable product”, or MVP model, is truly scandalous. It is a commercial model for piloting new products. Applied to Hospital 2.0 it means a “minimum viable set of services, in the minimum viable building size, to the minimum viable specifications, and at the minimum viable time and cost to build.”
It is assumed that MVP will reduce the cost of building some of the new hospitals by anything between 27% and 43%. So, the primary consideration is very clear. The model has been criticised by the National Audit Office, a Government spending watchdog, and the PAC. Both say it will result in hospitals that are too small, with insufficient beds, and unable to cope with increases in need – like flu epidemics, or another pandemic.
Funding for the new Whipps Cross Hospital is being cut to the bone. When it is finally rebuilt, the Margaret Centre itself will be demolished, because it sits on land that will be sold with planning permission for 1,500 homes. Standardised plans mean that Barts Health, who run Whipps Cross, have neither the flexibility, nor the funding, to rebuild the Margaret Centre.
Proposals for End of Life care in the Whipps Cross catchment area are now being led by NHS North East London, a new organisation that plans and pays for our health services.
Their initial proposal in January this year for people who are dying and are too ill to be cared for at home, or whose home circumstances mean they cannot be supported there, was to designate part of a ward in the new hospital for end of life care. This is despite them acknowledging that reserved beds may be needed for other emergency admissions, especially in a new hospital with too few beds.
Our petition called on Barts Health and NHS North East London to include rebuilding the Margaret Centre at Whipps Cross when the latter’s plans go out for formal public consultation at some point in the next few months.
However, NHS North East London is also grossly underfunded and by September this year it had an “unplanned” deficit of over £70million.
So what chance does our campaign have to save the Margaret Centre? It can only survive if we continue to fight and also if we get a Government that reverses the entrenched practice of increasing the role of the private sector while downgrading the capacity of the NHS. We need a Government that is truly committed to funding the NHS and its buildings, its staff and its services.
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