I don't really recognise this characterisation of Ealing Hospital from my own treatment and that of my family over the past 30 years. A few trips to A&E, septicaemia, smashed toe, and a chronic, recurrent knee injury have all been dealt with extremely faultlessly. OK that is a very small and anecdotal sample, but over the same period Hammersmith managed to damn near kill my wife and first baby, and St Richards in Chichester (beautiful place, hopelessly overstretched nursing staff) managed to destroy what mobility my mum still had before discharging her with undiagnosed pneumonia. She nearly died that night, and was dead within weeks.Northwick Park has a terrible local reputation, too. It's already overburdened. Although to be fair they were OK when my wife was taken there after a road accident.It seems to me that the NHS has systemic management problems, and I do so agree about the disastrous effect of PFI on budgeting, but the clinical and nursing staff are usually the least of the problems. I suspect, with utter certainty, that whatever hospitals get closed, combined, revamped, this will not fundamentally change, because the very people charged with implementing change are the core of the problem - the endless interlocking tiers of management, whose primary concern is their own careers. It is egregious, and probably devious to close the only hospital for miles, in the middle of a congested 300,000 catchment area. It simply won't work, and the capital costs of replacing EH will be prohibitive. EH either gets fixed and run better, or there effectively won't be any NHS for many local people. Which, it's hard not to conclude, is the whole idea.
Tony Sleep ● 5192d