No New Hatfield Hospital - now its official!

10.16.26pm GMT Mon 13th Nov 2006

Nigel Quinton, local health spokesperson

At last; the bad news we had long expected was delivered Friday by NHS bosses - there will be no new hospital built at Hatfield; apparently it is "unaffordable". There will be two major hospitals in Hertfordshire, but in all probability they will be at Watford and Stevenage - which just happen to be the constituencies of Labour's only two Herts MPs.

The announcement was made at a meeting held at Campus West, from which the press were excluded, by Anne Walker, Chief Executive of both Herts Primary Care Trusts. After a one month review, the PCT had concluded the hospital was not affordable. Question and answer sessions were dominated by Liberal Democrat councillors Malcolm Cowan (Handside & Peartree), Nick Hollinghurst (Tring), and Nigel Quinton (Handside).

Cllr Nigel Quinton, who is one of 3 local councillors on the recently formed Health Panel said "In just one month, the new PCT - which has no-one on its Board with Welwyn Hatfield connections - has undone the countless man-years of effort that went into the Investing in Your Health (IIYH) strategy announced in 2003, which told us there was a need for a new "super-hospital" and that this would be best sited in Hatfield. The calculation was presented as a four-line summation with no supporting data which we suspect is deeply flawed. It looks like the PCT is doing Labour's dirty work so that the government can claim, yet again, that it is not their fault," he continued.

It is clear that if Labour was not wedded to the Private Finance Initiative to provide the money for the new hospital, it would probably be affordable. All the experts who spoke on Friday agreed that PFI was not the right way to fund hospitals.

Not only will we lose the new hospital, but the future for the QEII remains unclear. All of the "interim" changes have been on the basis that we will get Hatfield as a replacement hospital. "These changes must stop, and probably should be reversed - the Trust could make a good start by re-opening its sterilisation unit at the QEII," Cllr Quinton insisted.

There was good news on Primary Care - we should be seeing a mini-revolution in the provision of routine health services in super-surgeries and the like, closer to home. But has anyone in the Borough seen any evidence of these changes? All most of us know is that we can no longer see our GP after hours or at weekends. No-one on the panel on Friday could provide a credible answer to our question as to how these new services were going to appear. "They seemed to be relying on magic", commented Cllr Malcolm Cowan.

The Liberal Democrats will continue to fight for the provision of proper health services in Welwyn Hatfield, and for the delivery of Labour's promises. We already have a large number of signatures for the "Save the Super Hospital Campaign", and would encourage everyone to log onto our website www.welhatlibdems.co.uk to add their support.