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HOWARD'S WAY.... a weekly column from Michael Howard MP

<IMG height=195 hspace=10 src="images/michaelhoward3.jpg" width=130 align=right vspace=10 border=0>2 February 2006

Last week I attended meetings with both the Kent Strategic Health Authority and the Shepway primary Care Trust.

Given the number of well-documented stories in the media of deficits in the National Health Service and the postponement of operations I particularly wanted to know whether these problems affect our own area.

The position seems to be that the East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust does have a significant deficit. It is, however, a deficit that is reducing and may well disappear altogether by the end of the financial year. I was given a categorical assurance that no operations are being postponed for financial reasons. If any readers have experiences which seem to be inconsistent with these assurances please let me know.

Further reorganisation is also on the agenda. It is hardly surprising that many people in the NHS are suffering from reorganisation fatigue.

The last eight years have seen endless reorganisations and yet more lie ahead. One of the things that is so frustrating is that many of these reorganisations have been introduced to make good the shortcomings of those that went before.

Currently the failure of the Strategic Health Authority is uncertain and the days of the Shepway Primary Care Trust are numbered. This saddens me. When Primary Care Trusts were set up I fought long and hard to make sure that Shepway was treated separately and got its own trust.

Now there is either to be one Primary Care Trust for the whole of Kent or one for East Kent and another for West Kent. Since I believe that decisions affecting the provision of public services should be as local as possible and taken closest to the people who are intended to be the beneficiaries, I am arguing for the two-trust option.

I shall let you know how the argument goes.