Star comment: Progress at last on Future Fit
At last, the trigger has been pulled on the spluttering Future Fit starting gun.
What has changed this week?
It is off to NHS England for what they call validation and once that has happened, which should not take long,- albeit that is always a dangerous assumption on any aspect of this process - the consultation can begin in earnest from early December.
Nobody should get their hopes up about a smooth journey, as Salopians know that the inherently controversial nature of the proposals and the desire for corners to be fought tooth and nail will mean that that is not going to happen. But at least the train will be leaving the station and the wheels will be in motion in a process which had got so badly bogged down that it looked in danger of being abandoned altogether and going back to the drawing board.
What new insights or constructive suggestions the consultation process brings remain to be seen. As the major players have all made their views abundantly clear already, the consultation will see a lot of familiar positions simply restated.
The prospect of either the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital or the Princess Royal Hospital at Telford losing their accident and emergency unit was emotive and there were never going to be many people, let alone local politicians, who would say: “No problem, close ours.”
As things have moved forward, the preferred option has boiled down to closing the A&E at Telford as part of a package of measures across both main hospitals. The core difficulty has been a mix of philosophy and geography, a head-on collision between what is perceived by health bosses as being the best solution for the county, and indeed parts of Mid Wales, as a whole, and the desire of ordinary people to have key services on their own patch.
It has created a dynamic in which the Future Fit process has had the effect of pitting one area of Shropshire against anotherarea of Shropshire. That is why it has so far proven impossible to forge a cross-county consensus when the feeling is that it is a question of winning or losing – and nobody wants to lose.
This is not something the consultation will of itself resolve, but is to be welcomed because it means that the counter has started moving around the board again to give a sense of progress towards whatever future Future Fit will eventually deliver.
