Tendring Topics……..on Line
Great Clacton Reacts!
A week or so ago I remarked in this blog that although I had learned that Holland-on-Sea residents were protesting strongly about Realize Health Ltd's plans for future general practitioner health care in Holland-on-Sea and Great Clacton, I hadn't yet heard how people in Great Clacton regarded them. I suspected that it would be without great enthusiasm!
In Great Clacton the commercial company now responsible for 'delivering health care in the Colchester and Tendring areas' is proposing to close down existing surgeries in North Road and Epping Close and replace them with a single medical centre in Kennedy Road. This was the site that had been proposed for the discredited and now-abandoned idea of a super-clinic serving both Holland-on-Sea and Great Clacton. On a street map the site is revealed as being in the bottom right hand corner of the very large area served by the present surgeries. What the street map doesn't, of course, show is that it is also at the top of a hill, that there is no bus service along the nearby main road, and that there isn't a single dwelling within easy walking distance.
The reaction in Great Clacton is, as I had expected, outrage! The protest is headed by Pete Halliday, who represents St John's ward on the Tendring District Council. He hopes to collect 1,200 signatures on a petition to keep Epping Close surgery open. This will be presented to the North East Essex Primary Care Trust, who are partners in Realize Health Ltd but whose main function seems to be to act as a 'shock absorber' between their commercial partners (masters?) and the public.
Councillor Halliday says that he has been a patient of the Epping Close surgery since 1983, adding: 'I have always received top-notch care. The whole staffing team appreciate the importance of seeing the patient in good time, seeing your own doctor and at a time to suit you as well as the doctor'.
Consultation on Realize Health's proposals will continue until the end of August. Mr Halliday urges Great Clactonians to visit the PCT's website www.northeastessexpct.nhs.uk to protest, or to write to Tonia Parsons, North East Essex PCT, Freepost, NAT21857, Clacton, CO15 4BR
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Protests from Left, Right (and probably Centre)
The idea of private firms providing (or delivering, as they seem to prefer) public services appears to be losing some of its appeal among members of the public and their elected representatives, if not to the Government. When I learned that the Council had set up a limited company, Tendring Regeneration Ltd with capital of £1.26 million, to 'regenerate' our district I had serious doubts about the whole idea, and expressed them on this blog.
Why on earth should they establish a private company to undertake a job that they should clearly do themselves? I find the explanation that a private company has access to grants not available to public authorities, unconvincing. What grants and who provides them? If it were really a good idea then why not abolish the whole Tendring Council and replace it with Tendring Local Services Ltd. That would have the advantage of not having to allow the press and public access to the meetings at which decisions are made! What's more, these wonderful grants available only to private firms could help reduce the Council Tax.
My doubts redoubled when I learned that the whole of that £1.26 million was to be spent on salaries of the supermen and superwomen who were to be appointed to access these grants and get on with the task of regeneration. It wasn't only I who had doubts. Neil Stock, leader of Tendring Council's opposition Conservative group, and Councillor Steven Henderson have both resigned in protest from Tendring Regeneration Ltd's Board of Directors. Mr Henderson is Community Representative Party's representative on the Council but I don't think that I am being unfair to either of these gentlemen if I describe them as being from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Needless to say Tendring Regeneration Ltd. is carrying on regardless. Their web site www.in-tend.org suggests that recruitment is well under way for most of the jobs that are going absorb those £1.26 million pounds. Just one post currently remains vacant; that of external funding officer on a salary of £33,000 a year. This is presumably the officer who will have the job of accessing those marvellous grants! I wish him (or her) luck ……and think that it will be needed!
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'Satan will find Mischief still…..'
I was shocked (and these days it takes quite a lot to shock me) to hear on a tv news bulletin that in this country something like 18 percent (almost one in five) of young people aged sixteen or seventeen are no longer in education but are neither in training nor employment.
Add to them the number of children aged from thirteen to sixteen who are at school, but have given up bothering with homework and have no other positive interests to pursue once they are through the school gate. Too many of these will also have no welcoming parent awaiting them when they get home.
Is it really surprising that we top the European league in teenage pregnancies, hooliganism, juvenile delinquency and vandalism?
My mother used to say:
Satan will
Find mischief still,
For idle hands to do!
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A Tale of Two Hospitals
We hear lots of reports, some good some bad, about NHS Hospitals. I was a briefly a patient at two, very different, Essex hospitals last week. This was my experience.
Broomfield Hospital Chelmsford
My experience didn't start very auspiciously. I had an appointment with the 'plastic surgeon' at Broomfield at 3.50 p.m. on Monday about a small sore on my left ear that obstinately refused to heal. During the previous week I had spent a frustrating hour or so on the phone arranging my transport to and from the hospital from Clacton. I won in the end but it left me wondering if some of the moans I had heard about bureaucracy in the NHS might be justified.
On the Sunday afternoon I had a phone call from the volunteer driver. He was picking me up the next day but he had to pick up another Clacton patient at 11.00 a.m. Would I mind travelling then? He would do his best to bring my appointment forward. I agreed, but without enthusiasm. I certainly wasn't looking forward to the possibility of hanging around in a hospital waiting room from about 12.30 till nearly 4 oclock!
Broomfield was, I discovered, a modern hospital with 'all mod.cons'. There was a spacious waiting room with very comfortable chairs and a snack bar. I 'clocked in', my driver fulfilling his promise to urge that my appointment should be brought forward. The receptionist was non-committal.
It was by then, as I had anticipated, just after 12.30. I cast my former-public- health-inspector's eye over my surroundings and was pleased to note that the floor of the waiting area and the whole of the snack bar and the toilet were immaculately clean. A somewhat severe looking member of the nursing staff was conducting an inspection, rubbing her gloved finger over horizontal surfaces and finding them dust-free. I had a coffee and a cheese sandwich at the snack-bar and settled down with a book to wait for anything up to nearly three hours.
To my astonishment barely twenty minutes elapsed before my name was called out and I was summoned to the consulting room of the plastic surgeon. He proved to be a genial gentleman who took a look at my ear through some kind of a magnifier before telling me that I had a relatively harmless form of skin cancer. He would cut it out and put in a graft. It would be a simple operation, performed on me as an out-patient at Colchester General Hospital under a local anaesthetic. I would be discharged home on the same day.
Back in the waiting room it was less than half an hour before my driver came looking for me. I was back home in Clacton before 3.50, the time of my original appointment! As far as I was concerned it was 'full marks for Broomfield'!
Essex County Hospital, Colchester
I didn't rely on hospital transport to get me to Essex County Hospital at 9.00 a.m. on Friday morning for the removal of my cataract on my right eye. This time I hired a taxi to take me there and back, thus saving my time and saving the NHS a pound or two. The fare of £20 each way was within my means.
Externally the Essex County Hospital could hardly be more different from the Broomfield. It is an old, somewhat forbidding Victorian building; the kind that 'modernisers' delight in tearing down and replacing with shining modern structures – that probably won't last half as long!
Inside, I suppose that the ophthalmic surgery waiting room wasn't quite so roomy, light and airy as the waiting room at Broomfield. Nor were the chairs quite so comfortable. The nursing staff were every bit as friendly, attentive and professional though and the attention to hygiene even more apparent. We all had to give our hands an alcohol rub before we were allowed into the waiting room. In preparation for a cataract operation each patient had to have three separate lots of eye drops at intervals of, I think, something like half an hour. I noticed that after administering drops to each patient the nurse would go across to the hand wash basin and wash her hands thoroughly before coming to give drops to the next one.
Eventually, I suppose it could have been after nearly two hours, the anaesthetist sat me in a special chair that could be converted into an operating table and wheeled me into the anteroom of the operating theatre. Here he completed the sterilising and anaesthetising process, rubbing a sterilising spirit into the whole of the right side of my face, warning me on no account to touch my face with my hands once that was done, giving me yet more eye drops and finally an injection near to my eye.
If any reader of this blog is awaiting a cataract operation they may be assured that when they are being wheeled into the actual operating theatre, the worst is almost certainly already over. A nurse held my hand throughout the operation. If I had needed to cough or to ease a cramped limb I had to give her hand a squeeze. The operation would then stop till the cough or limb movement was over. I was aware that someone was working on my face but I felt neither pain nor discomfort. How long does it take? I imagine that it varies but I glanced at my watch as I was wheeled into the operating theatre and again as I was wheeled out. Exactly twenty minutes had elapsed.
That was it. My eye had a pad that I was glad to be able to remove the next morning. I was given instructions about inserting eye drops myself, seeing my optician about new glasses, and seeing the surgeon again in about six weeks time.
I think that Essex County Hospital deserve full marks too. As a private patient in 2006 I hadn't had to wait quite so long for surgery on my other eye and the waiting room had been a bit more comfortable. But those were the only differences.
Oh yes – and I now have a date and place for the surgery on my ear; Colchester General Hospital on 7th August. Full marks for the NHS as well!
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