Ravenscourt Park Hospital: clone it don't close it

Meeting told 'no formal consultation needed' for popular hospital

A large audience, including Andrew Slaughter MP and numerous local councillors attended a public meeting on 28 September to discuss the proposed closure of Ravenscourt Park Hospital by Hammersmith Hospitals Trust. The audience made their views uite clear: Ravenscourt Park is an exceptional location offering an exceptional patient experience and closing it down would force patients to attend other hospitals with higher rates of post operative infection, all of which additionally have MRSA.

Representatives of the Trust stated that in the Trust's view this was not a substantial variation in service and as such no formal consultation was required.

The audience disageed vehemently with this. The Patient and Public Involvement Forum (PPIF) for Hammersmith Hospitals, an independent patient watchdog which had convened the meeting, voted by an overwhelming majority to refer the Trust to the local Scrutiny Committee for denying patients and the public their legal right to be consulted under Section 11 of the Health
and Social Care Act 2001.

Lynette Royle who chaired the meeting on behalf of the PPIF, said afterwards: "The public have made their views perfectly clear. Here we have a clean, pleasant MRSA free hospital which offers an exceptional standard of treatment and care on the NHS. This is the sort of
environment in which all of us would choose to be treated if we could, but that choice is being denied to us. People are quite rightly very angry indeed about it. We should be cloning Ravenscourt Park, not closing it."

October 16, 2006