Sandy 4 St Albans

I found tonight’s meeting in St Albans Town Hall to question the Primary Care Trust management over the cancelled St Albans Urgent Care Centre to be truly depressing.  Full marks to Anne Main for organising it at such short notice. We were told that Anne Walker, chief executive of the PCT, was out of the country.  I’m not surprised given the gibberish spoken tonight by her two underlings.

Director of Strategy and Director of Primary Care Services and Redesign – even their respective titles fill one with gloom.

The first choice for local residents would be a full service hospital in what is the most populous district in Hertfordshire.  That was taken away and we were promised a super-hospital at Hatfield instead as a second best.  Then we were told we couldn’t have that, so we were promised an Urgent Care Centre – third best.  Now it turns out we cannot even have that.

I asked the two PCT men whether they could state plain and simple whether services to St Albans residents would be better or worse as a result of the decision.  “That’s the wrong question,” they said.  Well not to me and local residents it isn’t.

There were some good questions tonight about whether an Urgent Care Centre is what we need.  There is clearly great confusion as to what services it would provide in the spectrum between minor injuries and blue light stuff.  But its cancellation becomes a metaphor for the endless down escalator in really local health service delivery.  The decision looks like it was made on the back of an envelope.  No wonder local people think the NHS has left them.

All we got from the two PCT representatives was evasive management speak.  St Albans is owed better given the sad history of let-down and betrayal.