Your Chance To Demand Answers This Saturday at St Peter’s

The second (and last) Patients Information & Discussion Event is taking place this Saturday 9 September at 10.30 am at Chertsey House, St Peter’s Hospital. This is your last chance to raise your objections to the closure of the Blanche Heriot Unit directly with the people responsible for this awful, ill-considered decision. Satisfactory plans have still not been made for the continuing care of patients who rely on the Blanche Heriot Unit. If the commissioners allow the Unit to close without adequate and accessible provision being made for its existing patients, then this is the height of irresponsibility and potentially life-threatening for the most vulnerable. That is why the BHU Patients Campaign has repeatedly called on the commissioners to extend the existing BHU contract for a further six months to allow proper planning of future services for both existing and future patients to take place. We made this request once again at the meeting of the Surrey County Council Adults & Health Select Committee on Monday. The Councillors squirmed as officers from Public Health and NHS England, and representatives from the new service provider, Central & North West London NHS Trust, struggled to respond to the submissions made to the meeting by Healthwatch Surrey, the BHU Patients Group and the Surrey Coalition for the Disabled. A number of the Councillors asked pertinent and searching questions about the lack of consultation, the lack of information about CNWL’s contract performance to date and the lack of clarity about future service arrangements. Once again we were met with obfuscation, evasion and misinformation. The Committee’s response was to recommend: • That the performance of the sexual health and HIV service contracts are reviewed in 9 months’ time. • That the Committee establish a task group to review the implementation phase, consultation process and lessons learnt from the commissioning of sexual health and HIV services, with a view to informing future commissioning of services. A review in 9 months’ time will be of no help to patients who do not know how or where their care is to be provided when the Blanche Heriot Unit closes. It is of no help to those people throughout Surrey who can no longer access a local contraception and sexual health screening service since the wholesale closure of clinics by CNWL when they took over in April. The task group will only be of help if it starts taking evidence from patients, GPs and other relevant interests straight away, and starts exercising rigorous scrutiny of CNWL’s current contract performance in Surrey now. Unfortunately the Committee Chair, Ken Gulati, has gone on holiday until 25 September and it seems we must await his return before we find out what the membership, terms of reference, timescale and method of working will be for the task group. Unless those with the necessary authority decide now that the safe and responsible decision is to keep the Blanche Heriot Unit open for another six months the task group’s work will have no impact on the current situation. We are in this mess because of a deeply flawed commissioning process – Surrey County Council should put that right before thinking about future commissioning arrangements. We need answers and solutions. This closure is life or death for many patients. BHU is the heart of people's lives, allowing them to function knowing they have the support they need. We need to keep sharing our concerns and sharing our stories so please COME ON SATURDAY.