• Henry Smith writes to the NHS trust to complain about them closing down the Crawley Hospital mortuary
• Trust replies that it is not closed and there are no plans to close it
• Trust adds that when deaths occur in the community the bodies will go elsewhere, but that is the result of a decision by the county council’s appointed coroners.

I think that sums it up, but I prefer the coverage of the same story in the Crawley News, if only for the last bit that says:

Cllr Smith has now requested a meeting with trust bosses because of the “apparent confusion” over the mortuary.

“Apparent confusion”?  Nothing apparent about it.  If Henry thinks that it is closing when it isn’t then he is definately confused, and he seems to be the only one.  The trust are perfectly clear about what is happening in their own organisation, the coroners know what is going on, and those officers of the county council who went to talks with the coroners and the trust know what is going on.  If Cllr Smith wants to hold a meeting with anyone it should be whoever it is in his own empire that should have told him what was going on but didn’t.

Is there any truth in the rumour that Mickey Mouse wears a Henry Smith watch?

It was a bit of a drag waiting to be seen, but for me its a straight choice between turning up and waiting and calling the doctor – from work because that is where I would be when they open – to make an appointment, getting a call back from a triage nurse and explaining my delicate groinal condition while a work colleague is loitering trying to catch my attention, and ideally getting an appointment in eight or nine hours time or having to leave work if its any earlier.

Actually I’m sure its not that bad, and everyone else round here has no problems with the doctors but that is just my perception of it all.  I would much rather have a place where I could just turn up at six or seven in the evening and wait for a bit to see a GP.  For me the biggest problem with what I still think of as the Walk-in Centre is that there is only one of them so it is busy.

Weekends are another problem.  In this particular case I need to get a dressing changed. The surgeon said that my GP’s practice nurse can do it, butof course it needs doing before Monday, leaving me with going back to the hospital as my only option. That probably contributes to why there can be queues at the hospital: people needing routine stuff like that who just can’t get to their GP during normal surgery hours.

We still need normal GPs.  They do the job perfectly well for a lot of their patients, but unless they are going to open at seven or earlier and stay open until nine or later there are a lot of us who find them inconvenient so I’m a big fan of the idea of polyclinics.  I don’t think they would lead to closing GPs but would be a valuable supplement to them.

I was only going through the hospital system at 2:00am because my company works half days on Fridays and I had been trying to live with a problem until Friday and go to the Doctors in the afternoon: a cunning plan that was thwarted only by the pain getting too much by late on Thursday.

1. apart from the obvious one

I have spent most of the week in either discomfort or pain in the blind hope that it would all go away on its own, but tonight it just got too much and I went down to Crawley Hospital.  I was thinking maybe there would be brief nasty experience on the wrong end of a sterilised needle or something and didn;t expect to be sent up to East Surrey Hospital straight away to have scalpels wielded dangerously close to the family jewels.

I’m absolutely knackered, but just trying to postpone the need to climb all those stairs. And also trying not to think about how it might feel when the dressing gets ripped off on Saturday and I end up with half a ‘Brazilian’.

Be thankful I am not Kerron so will not be supplying photos of the ‘affected area’

Now I don’t have anything against East Surrey Hospital, although I prefer hospitals to be built upwards and not designed as low, sprawling campuses, but it is a bugger to get to from here.  We are only about 100 metres from the motorway so the first bit is easy: straight up the M23 to Gatwick.  After that it gets a bit nasty because you have the A23 and that stretch of the A23 is hardly what you expect from an ‘A’ road: single-carriageway, with 40mph speed limits on most of it.

In fact the accessibility of East Surrey Hospital and how long it would take an ambulance to get there from Crawley or Horsham is one of the main planks of the argument to build a new hospital here.  The irony is that the hospital is located in a place which could potentially have fantastic transport links. It is a mere 100 metres from the railway line and less than 3km from the M23 – but there is no railway station or motorway junction.

While a new hospital is always going to be welcome, it is not likely to happen while there are so many arguments about it. For a start there is no support from MPs, councillors or the public in East Surrey or Mid-Sussex for a new hospital in the Crawley/Horsham area, in fact they are dead against it.  While all those arguments are going on, why not look into a motorway junction?

Ideally there would be a full-blown junction with a direct spur road to the hospital, but a cheaper solution should be possible – a silly half-junction like the Maidenbower one with the access only from the South.  You could link it to Green Lane and upgrade that road a bit instead of having a whole new one.  Even cheaper would be to have an ambulance-only exit like they have those works exits, but that wouldn’t help visitors or people going to hospital under their own steam.

A basic, functional junction could be built really quickly, would cut journey times by anything from ten to thirty minutes, and it would still be worth having even if a new hospital gets built here because there would still be transfers between hospitals. or is that too easy?   There must be a catch.

In fact there is a sizeable minority in the town who think that the hospital closed down completely. We have used the place quite extensively, being blessed with acident-prone children, and some people are genuinely surprised to hear that we have always had them treated in Crawley instead of Redhill.

The latest example of this ’spin’ is on the front page of the Crawley News this week. It is a story about a child who had her finger sliced up at the funfair, and found no first aid facilities available. It says:

After the accident, Mr Harris and his girlfriend searched for someone to help, but say there were no first aiders available.

The group was left with no option but to rush Megan to the Urgent Treatment Centre on West Green Drive.

Megan was later rushed to Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead where doctors saved her finger.

So what is the “Urgent Treatment Centre” on West Green Drive? It is, of course Crawley Hospital. Why not just say she was taken to Crawley Hospital where she was treated before being transferred to specialists?

I choose to believe this is not a deliberate policy of the News to suppress any mention of Crawley Hospital in a positive light but a result of the perfidious and chronic campaign to undermine the place making it a reflex to do just that unthinkingly.

Or am I reading too much into it?

After we had finished we found ourselves hungry and at the Tilgate Parade, which contains our favourite fish & chip shop in the town so we decided to treat ourselves.

While we were waiting I noticed a huge pile of hospital petitions on the counter. Nothing unusual there, every establishment in town seems to have had a pile of hospital petitions at one time or another, but this one was different; it was called The Surrey Hospital Petition.

As you can see in the Surrey Comet it says:

To assure the integrity of ‘The Surrey Petition’ it must only be signed once by those people who live, work or study in Surrey and who rely on Surrey’s hospitals, as well as the many people who have to cross borders into Surrey for their nearest hospital.

I/We are strongly opposed to any future closure or downgrading of hospitals and Accident and Emergency Centres in Surrey

Interesting. The copies circulating in Crawley have some extra text which more or less says how this applies to places like Crawley.

The residents of Crawley have been signing petitions about improving Crawley hospital or building a new one at Pease Pottage or elsewhere. If that happened it would greatly reduce demand at East Surrey Hospital and pile on pressure to possibly reduce services there. The MP up there, Crispin Blunt, has been doing everything he can to prevent any sort of development in Crawley which would represent a risk to East Surrey.

He tried to hamper our own MP’s attempts to preserve services and then made official complaints when she was successful in getting a moratorium on transfers. I am willing to go out on a limb and predict that he has signed this petition.

The way I see it, this petition is more or less demanding that Crawley hospital does not get re-developed, re-built or re-located, and yet dozens and dozens of Crawley residents are signing it. Did they not read it?

Or am I just getting the wrong end of the stick somehow?

They already have a name for the development, Gatwick Green, and a website for it – devoid of any content.

With hard information very thin on the ground, it is hard to say whether these plans are any good or not, or even whether there is much substance to them. BAA don’t like the plans because of issues around safeguarding for possible future runways, Reigate and Banstead council don’t like them because they don’t like any development anywhere near Gatwick, and Crawley council don’t like them either. Me? I would argue that we need some decent, affordable homes much more than we need ‘luxury’ homes. Its possible that we need a good quantity of affordable and social housing more than we need anything.

Reigate and Banstead obviously have real concerns about the so-called strategic gap. Realistically that is sensible for them: they can see the possibility of Horley getting sucked into a possible future unitary authority based on an expanded Crawley, and don’t fancy that at all.

BAA Gatwick are still clinging to the possibility of a second runway, even though BAA as a whole would really prefer to see Heathrow getting a new runway.

Crawley council’s objection seems to be that this development is not in the current local plan, or whatever the new name for it is.

It looks to me like the area in question is more or less what has been referred to as the North-East Sector which was always earmarked for development as a new neighbourhood, which would have had some small amount of business and community facilities in it, but predominantly ‘normal’ housing and certainly not a major employment centre and not with any sort of planning gain on the scale of a new hospital.

The hospital is the key here. It is such a major issue locally that you are guaranteed to get attention for your cause if you can manage to to link it to that. So it may be that the whole hospital aspect is just a hook to gain public support and that it is masking an ulterior political motive. There are no detailed plans, no detailed costings, no indication of what facilities the hospital would have or even whether it would fit in the local NHS or be largely private.

Maybe that is what is upsetting the Tories? They are already doing the same thing with their Campaign 4 Pease Pottage Hospital. That is another ill-conceived, vague, proposal for a hospital, where the main aim is to drum up support for something otherwise unwelcome. Are the Tories really upset because Gatwick Green is pissing on their plans to generate political capital out of the public’s desire for a hospital?

Even if you do consider children to be the product of the education system rather than part of it, its a matter of political common sense as well as protocol that the first thing you praise when visiting a school is its pupils, and the second thing is its staff.

I thought that was both amusing and indicative of how this ‘Caring Conservatives’ charm offensive is just a thin veneer on top of the old Tory party we know so well. I did not expect to have it trumped so soon.

There was a very important meeting today about the future of Crawley Hospital, involving the possibility of control being transferred to the local PCT and away from the Surrey & Sussex NHS trust which has screwed everything up so monumentally.

One of our Tory councillors was there. Actually I assume that several were there, but this one in particular felt that he had to justify his attendance and said he was there because he has a son and daughter working there and wanted to be reassured that they would not be losing their jobs.

No mention of whether there would be any improvement in provision for patients, or anything like that. I do hope he said that within hearing of one of the reporters from the local press.

And who was this defender of the public interest? None other than my own local councillor, standing for re-election this year. Perhaps it gives a clue why I was so amused to see his name so prominent on a leaflet with the title “In Touch”

I know it must have been bad because I had to drive home when I got off the train. Jayne never lets me drive anywhere unless she is totally exhausted or has had a drink.

This evening she went to Crawley Hospital to have her foot looked at and has come home in bandages and on crutches. Apparently it is badly sprained. Much as I would like to see a proper casualty department at the hospital, I have to say that the walk-in centre has done us proud over the last year or so.