Save Lewisham Hospital: Legal Challenge Goes Ahead, Plus New Actions Confirmed

Please support the “Born in Lewisham Hospital” event on Saturday March 16 , and, if you can, contribute to Lewisham Council’s Legal Challenge Fund to pay for the Judicial Review that has just been launched, to prove that the plans to close Lewisham Hospital’s A&E Department and severely downgrade other services is illegal!

The struggle to save Lewisham Hospital from destruction continues, with undiminished energy, I’m glad to report. I have been a resident of Lewisham, in south east London, for the last 15 years, and I am proud of the creativity, commitment and clear-sighted indignation of my fellow residents campaigning against the wretched proposals to disembowel the hospital, conceived of, proposed and endorsed by both senior NHS officials and the government.

To recap briefly (although my archive of articles is here, and I also recommend the Save Lewisham Hospital website and Facebook page), at the end of October Matthew Kershaw, an NHS Special Administrator appointed by the former health secretary Andrew Lansley to deal with the financial problems of a neighbouring NHS trust (the South London Healthcare Trust, covering the boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley) proposed that King’s (in Camberwell) should take over one of the SLHT’s hospitals, while another, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, on a remote, blasted heath in Woolwich, should merge with Lewisham.

Kershaw was the first administrator appointed under specific “unsustainable providers” legislation, of which there are many critics (myself included), who see that trusts may end up in debt for all kinds of reasons, including, as in the case of the SLHT) monstrous PFI deals that ought to have been illegal. However, there was at least a certain logic at work with regard to the proposals for King’s to take over one hospital, and for Lewisham to merge with Queen Elizabeth.

This was not all, though. Kershaw also recommended that Lewisham Hospital should have its services severely downgraded — proposing that the hospital should have its A&E Department axed (despite recently being refurbished at a cost of £12m), and have 60 percent of its buildings sold. Campaigners immediately picked up on the injustice of punishing Lewisham, run by an independent trust and not in financial difficulties, for the SLHT’s problems, and also picked up on the alarming fact that, if the proposals were to go ahead, there would only be one A&E Department, at Queen Elizabeth, for the 750,000 people in three boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich, and Bexley, whose A&E Department has already been closed.

[image error]make a donation.