MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT CALL ON IRP TO REJECT HORTON PROPOSALS

Joint-submission says Trust's plan will lead to "deaths and disability"

Four local MPs' have called on the Independent Reconfiguration Panel to advise the Health Secretary to reject the Oxford Radcliffe NHS Trust's proposals to downgrade services at the Horton General Hospital.

In a joint-submission to the panel examining plans to downgrade children services at the Horton, Tony Baldry (Banbury), David Cameron (Witney), Tim Boswell (Daventry) and John Maples (Stratford on Avon), said the proposals were potentially unsafe and would undermine the idea of a local, patient-led NHS.

The MPs' will meet with the panel to give oral evidence in the New Year.

In the submission, the Members of Parliament state:

"We would submit that this is broadly a difference of medical opinion between on the one hand the overwhelming majority of local family doctors, nurses, midwives and other medical staff at the Horton, who want to ensure that there is a local patient-led NHS, and consultants and managers of the Oxford Radcliffe NHS Trust based in Oxford, whose policy initiatives appear to be driven by a need for a training-led NHS.

It is very clear to us as Members of Parliament that local GPs continue to make it clear that they believe that local mortality rates will rise and that delays in treatment will result in deaths and disability as a consequence of the Trust’s proposed changes if they were to be implemented.

The question that the IRP must ask themselves, both at the outset and the conclusion of their deliberations, is how proposals that are clearly seen by in effect the totality of the local community, as a serious and substantial downgrading of local hospital services, can in any way be considered to be an enhancement of the NHS."