Star comment: Future Fit remains an opportunity

So says the Montgomeryshire MP Glyn Davies – and he is of course entirely wrong.

Because nailing blancmange to a wall is, to mix metaphors, a piece of cake compared to the task of coming up with some agreed, coherent, and workable strategy for the Future Fit programme, which will shape the NHS in Shropshire, and in which many of his Mid Wales constituents - who look to Shropshire for treatment - have a direct interest.

For all its complications and different avenues and alleyways, there has at the heart been one crucial question to which the answer today remains unresolved.

Where should the county’s single emergency centre – that is, what the general public understands as the principal accident and emergency centre – go? The recommendation on the table is that it should be at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.

Telford & Wrekin Council, fighting for the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, threatened to go to court.

So we still do not know the answer. What could have been a negotiation is a battle, with partisans on both sides, and emotions running high.

Mr Davies says there are individuals trying to frustrate progress and has given a general call to hurry things up, so decisions are made by the end of this year. Those who he thinks are frustrating progress do not see it that way themselves, as they view proposals which they believe to be to the detriment of their area not to be progress, but regression, leading to a worse service. As one of the major issues is staff shortages, and this cannot be resolved quickly.

Even if Future Fit unexpectedly reached a consensus road map for the future of Shropshire’s NHS, it would still be a while for the fixes to work through. Meanwhile the service hovers in perpetual crisis or near-crisis, with maternity services under pressure and midwife-led units being shut temporarily through staffing issues, and warnings about the number of consultants at A&E. Future Fit is an opportunity for Shropshire to make its own decisions, to take control.

But as things drag on there is a danger the opportunity will be snatched away by events, special circumstances or outside influences, leading to enforced changes which hit all of Shropshire, leaving all Salopians upset, and those who have been fighting their corners so long and so hard may find that even the corners have been taken away.