Crispin Blunt

Conservative Party | Reigate

MP attacks “sacking” of Health Chief

The sudden resignation of Lorraine Clifton as Chief Executive of Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust took effect 31st December 2006. It had been announced three working days earlier. 40% of Reigate constituents use hospital services provided by The Trust. Following investigation into the circumstances, Crispin Blunt, MP for Reigate, issued the following statement:

“I bitterly regret this most unwelcome news. My experience over the last three years is that Lorraine Clifton is a first-class professional who led a Trust in the most difficult circumstances. Her effective dismissal is yet another in a pattern of local institutional leaders, be they hospital chief executives, prison governors, head-teachers, or college principals being invited to pay the ultimate professional price for the failings of a system over which they have no control. Most of these individuals have been dedicated public servants whose untimely “resignations” have done nothing to advance the public interest, but have instead served the interests of the senior bureaucrats and ministers who administer the system in finding more junior scapegoats for the failures of their policy. This was certainly the case with Lorraine Clifton.

“For three years Lorraine Clifton led a hospital trust faced with all the pressures of providing healthcare in the under-funded South-East. The institution represented an earlier marriage between Epsom and St Helier Hospitals that was an unhappy one to say the least. She was reconciling these difficulties and had presided over an excellent plan for the future provision of secondary healthcare in “Better Healthcare Closer to Home” which was widely welcomed by local clinicians. It did not however meet the political requirements of the Labour Party or some other local politicians. They, along with NHS London, then served to make her life impossible. No-one would have been able to reconcile the need to make service changes within an existing financial year to meet the deficits of other organisations within the NHS and satisfy a local public already utterly fed up with the disgraceful and unfair way that the Government has treated public services in the South-East.

“Lorraine Clifton’s treatment has been utterly shabby and yet another shocking example of the demolition of the ethos of public service by a Labour Government.”