A CONSULTATION on the future of some health services in Gloucestershire is now live, writes Leigh Boobyer.

It is looking at the local NHS’ vision to split up some specialist health services across the county’s two main hospital sites, such as general surgery.

Gloucestershire County Council’s health scrutiny committee gave the nod for the local NHS to ask the public for feedback in a consultation yesterday (October 22).

NHS chiefs have said its vision does not include any proposal to close Cheltenham’s A&E department or change its pre-pandemic opening hours.

Here’s everything you need to know.

Specialist healthcare services shake-up

The local NHS wants to reorganise some services in Gloucestershire Royal and Cheltenham General hospitals under a project called ‘Fit For The Future’.

This vision would see the two hospitals created as “centres of excellence”, it said.

The ‘Fit For The Future’ consultation has been put forward by Gloucestershire’s NHS chiefs to ask the public for feedback on the future of specialist services, and was proposed before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Services such as general surgery would be reorganised, with emergency patients going to Gloucestershire Royal while patients who book an appointment would go to Cheltenham General.

The services which the NHS wants to ask the public and staff on are:

Acute medicine.

Gastroenterology inpatient services (medical care for stomach, pancreas, bowel or liver problems).

General surgery (conditions relating to the gut).

Image guided interventional surgery (where surgeons use instruments with live images to guide the surgery including following a heart attack, trauma and cancer).

Trauma and orthopaedic inpatient services (diagnosis and treatment of conditions relating to the bones and joints).

The consultation will run from October 22 to December 17, 2020.

From 22 October, members of the public, community partners and staff can visit www.onegloucestershire.net/yoursay or email: glccg.participation@nhs.net to request information.

If they can’t get on the internet or use email, the NHS can also send people information or arrange a telephone conversation – call 0800 0151 548 to leave a message.

On the website, consultees will find the full consultation booklet (and survey), the summary and easy read versions and other supporting information.

There will also be links to the new online consultation space here where people can get involved in activities like discussion forums.

In the health scrutiny committee today, some councillors expressed concerns it is the “wrong time” to change some services while the Covid-19 pandemic is still present.

Labour councillor Steve Lydon: “The overriding concern is that I do not think this will get a fair hearing, and we risk complicating the messaging we are supposed to be working on in Covid-19.

“I have discussed this locally with people. The reaction I get is ‘you must be bloody mad to be doing this now’. I do think this is the wrong time to do this, you will not get a fair response.”

Liberal Democrat councillor Martin Horwood: “We are in the middle of a pandemic. We do not know what the battle of acute care is going to look like in a years time.

“We do not know whether there will be a vaccine in place. We do not know what the treatments will be. We do not have the national and international learning from this pandemic. We do not know what the recruitment is going to look like.

“It just seems highly likely that if we plan major change now, in a years time we will be looking at modifying it all anyway, because we would have learnt many things from the pandemic.”

Chief executive of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Deborah Lee, said in the meeting: “This is the thing that drives me forward everyday. If we do not go forward with this, we are delaying some of the most careful benefits to patients in Gloucestershire that we have ever put before this meeting.

“It was talked at length this morning about the benefits improved outcomes, better experience, less to travel, care being delivered locally that would otherwise be delivered further apart. Staff who right now are choosing to go work in other centres because we have not got a clear, strategic vision for the service they want to work in. I could go on and on, and I will not.

“In deferring in an open-ended context we would all be collectively denying both our colleagues in hospital services and social care, but most importantly, 660,000 residents. We would be denying them these benefits.”