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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

26 June 2008

Next Friday marks the 60th anniversary of the NHS and I’ll be attending Buckland Hospital for a tea party to celebrate the occasion.

The NHS is the Labour Party’s greatest achievement. We created it, we saved it, we value it and we will always support it.

Since 1997, our investment in the NHS has trebled to £100 billion. This has paid for 38,000 more doctors, 80,000 more nurses, over a hundred new hospitals, new community health centres and the shortest waiting times since records began but it hasn’t stopped the local Health Trusts abandoning Buckland Hospital.

Sixty years on, Labour is changing the NHS – we want to make it a more personal health service, fitted to the needs of families and focused on preventing ill health as well as curing patients.

We are extending GP opening hours to include some evenings and weekends and opening over 100 new GP practices, creating 152 new GP-led health centres which will stay open from 8am-8pm, seven days a week and by the end of this year nobody will have to wait more than 18 weeks from diagnosis to hospital treatment.

Most waits are already shorter than this – even for people in Dover which has been badly let down by the failure of the two Trusts to get their acts together. They should have spent the recent years co-operating and working together to deliver first class health services to Dover and Deal but instead they have been in disagreement about the way health care should be provided, they have pursued their own agendas at the expense of my constituents and we have all been the losers.

In the last six years we have seen the announcement of a multi-million redevelopment plan for Buckland which was announced and promoted with a great fanfare, only to see the plans abandoned by the Trust three months later. Then we were told that the Primary Care Trust would take over the running of Buckland Hospital and pump lots of new funding into it, only to see the plans quietly abandoned.

Since then numerous flawed consultation exercises have taken place but there has been no real progress and no meaningful action. There has been stagnation – except of course for the continued removal of wards and services by the Trusts.

The most damaging blow to Buckland was when the Trust broke their promises and removed Day Surgery without any consultation. When they did start consulting on further change the process was badly flawed and the genuine voice of Dover – expressed through our 2006 “Hands off Buckland Hospital ” petition with its thousands of signatures – was totally ignored by the Trust.

The new boss of the Hospital Trust says he has the funding to provide us with the sort of local health facility that Dover deserves but we still don’t know what it will be, where it will be or when it will be provided. It would be nice to see a start during this special anniversary year and celebrate with another tea party - but I’m not holding my breath.