£76 Million Wasted on Plans to Close and Downgrade Local Hospitals

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Local MP calls for enquiry into failed Shaping a Healthier Future scheme

Yesterday, in response to a question from the MP in the House of Commons, the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted: "I can certainly say that I think the Shaping a Healthier Future Programme for North West London has not perhaps delivered the results that we wanted."

Andy Slaughter replied by tweeting @hammersmithandy:
"In response to my Q, BorisJohnson readily admitted that the SaHf Programme was a failure.

"If the PM can admit this during his first week in office, then it's clear. There must be an enquiry into the grotesque waste of public money + resource that went into this failed plan."

According to a confidential internal NHS document which had been passed to The Guardian, £76m was spent on management consultants for the failed scheme from 2010-11 until the end of 2018.

Shaping a Healthier Future argued that four acute hospitals – Hammersmith, Central Middlesex, Charing Cross and Ealing – could be downgraded, with the loss of more than 600 acute hospital beds which would be replaced with care in the community.

In fact, the document reports there has been a reduction of just seven hospital beds in the last six years.

The closure of Charing Cross was particularly controversial after plans were revealed to sell off 87% of the valuable site on Fulham Palace Road. Save Our Hospitals campaigners and H&F Council fought a long running campaign to stop the plans.

In March this year, the health secretary Matt Hancock, made a surprise announcement that the plans, including downgrading the A&E departments at Charing Cross and Ealing Hospitals, would no longer go ahead.

The document says: "Continued growth in demand for acute care, despite investment in primary and community services, a growing underlying budget deficit and shortfalls in our ability to recruit and retain enough staff with the right skills means that the plan, as originally envisaged, is no longer viable."

It says there has been an increase of 227,288 A&E attendances across north-west London since 2012 – a 4% rise per year, with a 2018-19 waiting list of 177,395 patients, which would require the provision of 95 extra beds for a year to clear the backlog. The document adds there has been a 40% increase in patients waiting for non-urgent surgery.

The document also reveals how officials plan to 'spin' this failure by citing improvements such as 100 new midwives and 90 new children’s nurses.

In a somewhat baffling section, under the heading "incorrect/sorry", the question is asked: "Will anyone resign over this?" and the answer provided is "no". It also asks: "What have you learned from this and how will you change the way you make decisions in the future to ensure millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money isn’t wasted?", receiving the following answer: "??".

Merril Hammer, secretary of Hammersmith & Fulham Save Our Hospitals, said: “The leaked paper is extraordinary. This was the biggest reorganisation project the NHS has ever seen. We still don’t know how much it has cost in total. Since the initial plans were drawn up, campaigners asked for the evidence that 'out of hospital' provision could reduce the need for acute hospital beds. This was never produced."

Cllr Ben Coleman, chair of Hammersmith and Fulham’s health and wellbeing board, said: "This leaked document confirms that SaHF was a grotesque waste of time and public money, which threatened life-saving health services."

A spokeswoman for NHS North West London Collaboration of Clinical Commissioning Groups, which includes Hammersmith & Fulham CCG, told the newspaper that some of the spending on management consultants predated April 2013, when the CCGs were first set up, so could not be verified.

She confirmed that between April 2013 and March this year, the ' spend on consultancies' for the SaHF programme was £43 million, adding: " There are now strict controls on management consultancy expenditure and we are not currently incurring consultancy costs for the development of our future plans, nor do we intend to."

She highlighted achievements of SaHF including the transformation of paediatric and maternity services in north-west London and an increase in children being treated without admission to a hospital ward.

She added that while SaHF was no longer going forward and was being replaced with the NHS long-term plan: " We will however continue to learn and incorporate lessons from the previous programme into future work”.

July 26, 2019