The chief inspector of hospitals has recently reported on local hospitals Care Quality Commission. The report on Queen Charlotte’s in Du Cane Road concludes it is “good”.

However Hammersmith Hospital, Charing Cross and St Mary’s Paddington are each given the verdict “requires improvement”.

Within those overall judgments there are some wide variations. For instance the A&E at Charing Cross was rated “good” while the Oupatients service was judged “inadequate”.

For St Mary’s the Critical Care and Maternity and gynaecology were both rated “good” but the A&E “inadequate.”

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust chief executive Dr Tracey Batten said:

“While we are disappointed with our overall rating of ‘requires improvement’, we think the report is extremely constructive. It clearly sets out our challenges while also recognising the positive impact of our work over the past year and highlighting the great care that we already provide.

“We acknowledge that there are a few areas, such as cleanliness in St Mary’s A&E, that have simply not been acceptable and there can be no excuse for that. But we want to assure patients that this is the exception and that we have acted immediately to address the most pressing issues raised. For example, we have already put in extra staff support and refurbished the A&E at St Mary’s Hospital – with new flooring and lighting, more sinks and additional cleaning rotas. The CQC has now re-inspected St Mary’s A&E and has confirmed that the required improvements have been made.”

The Labour MP for Hammersmith Andrew Slaughter highlighted the contrasting verdicts on the A&E departments and saying it showed plans to close the A&E at Charing Cross are wrong. The problem with this point is that there are no such plan. The NHS have made clear that there will continue to be a full A&E department at Charing Cross. Mr Slaughter is full aware of this yet he persists with spreading the allegation. That makes him a liar.

But there is another point. The good news is that the local NHS failings have been exposed, detailed recommendations published to put them right and those measures are being taken – or indeed have already been taken.

How has this come about? How do we know what is going on? It is because this Government introduced this level of transparency. They introduced the post of Chief Inspector of Hospitals to act as whistleblower-in-chief and produce these reports. That came about after the scandal at Mid Staffs Hospital – when the mentality was one of “cover up” rather than facing up to problems and dealing with them. Disgracefully poor care continued for years because of a lack of transparency and accountability. That was the way the NHS was run when Andy Burnham was Health Secretary.

Andrew Slaughter voted against the legislation last year to establish a chief inspector of hospitals who could provide independent information about the quality of services. Now he is quoting from information that would have been suppressed had he won that vote. He should apologise for that desist from his scaremongering. No matter how frequently he repeats it that doesn’t make the lie about the Charing Cross A&E closing true.

Guest post from Cllr Andrew Brown

This morning I spoke on BBC Radio London commenting on the Mail on Sunday article about Charing Cross Hospital’s A&E.

The headline dramatically states that “A&E unit in London faces axe… after PM promised personally it would stay open” although later the article admits that “A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘The Health Secretary has already been clear that Charing Cross Hospital should continue to offer an A&E service which provides high quality urgent and emergency care services 24/7.’”

So why is the Mail suggesting that “NHS papers show” Charing Cross Hospital will only have an “urgent care centre”? This is entirely false. The papers in question are from July’s Imperial board meeting and make it clear that the A&E will stay.  At the bottom of the article, Imperial is again quoted saying that “There is no proposal to close the A&E at Charing Cross Hospital”.

The answer is that they foolishly believed their source.  Andrew Slaughter recently endorsed a claim that the Mail was “at the very least negligent and very possibly dangerous” about checking its facts.

He obviously spotted an opportunity.  Rather than sitting down to read the 284-page Imperial board papers, the journalist appears to have swallowed Slaughter’s spin and then regurgitated his press release.

The reality is that Charing Cross will keep an A&E. We have also been promised by the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister that it will be an A&E. It won’t be in the same shape or form as it currently is, but it will be a lot more than an Urgent Care Centre.

The detailed model is awaiting the second phase of Prof Sir Bruce Keogh’s Urgent and Emergency Care Review. This is a national review about improving care that was set up long before the Charing Cross decision. Although Imperial’s board papers contain a lot of information, they confirm that the “Keogh review will help determine how the Emergency Care services for a local hospital will be configured”.

Unfortunately, Labour don’t care about the specialisation of emergency care or the evidence that it will save lives. They ran their council campaign on lies about the NHS because they had no coherent policies for the borough. Andrew Slaughter wants to make the general election
about the same lies on the NHS because Labour has no coherent policies for the country.

Labour’s NHS scaremongering has even been picked up by the SNP during the independence campaign and is putting the Union at risk.

It’s clear that we can’t trust Labour to tell the truth about the NHS.

The people we should trust are the expert clinicians. It is doctors who are leading these decisions about NHS reform, not politicians. We should scrutinise and hold them to account, but when all the evidence and clinical experts are saying reforms will improve care and save lives, we should also listen to them.

A guest post from Cllr Lucy Ivimy

The old, and still current in many cases, model of the A&E department at your nearest hospital was that it would be staffed at night and the weekend by someone called an A&E consultant who was basically a general surgeon with some specialist emergency training.

He could deal effectively with the great majority of people and injuries turning up at A&E. But if you turned up at the weekend with a stroke, a serious heart attack, a smashed skull, or been run over by a bus he would do his best to patch you up until Monday morning for the serious specialists to do their job. People died.

People who would have been saved if they had had specialist surgery immediately, died. It is called the weekend effect.

The NHS started some years ago setting up specialist units to counter the worst of the weekend death toll. The major trauma centre at St Mary’s Paddington is one of a small number in London staffed by specialists round the clock. The ambulance knows to take you there if you have a smashed skull and the brain surgeon will deal with it immediately. This has saved many many lives.

The brilliant Charing Cross stroke unit will start specialist remedial treatment immediately so your chances of walking out rather than being pushed out, crippled, in a wheelchair, are hugely higher.

Survival rates for heart attacks have gone up by 40% since ambulances take you straight to the specialist heart unit at Hammersmith Hospital.

The NHS ‘Shaping a Healthier Future’ proposals were designed to take this one step further, so that all life threatening conditions would be automatically taken to a major specialist emergency centre with the full range of specialist consultants on duty twenty four hours a day seven days a week. For minor emergencies, which is about 80% of all the people who currently turn up at A&Es, the nearest hospital would still deal with it.

But the NHS made three serious mistakes:

• First, they failed to explain clearly what they were doing and why
• Second, they refused to allow anything except these new ‘super’ A&Es to call themselves that, so everything thought that they were withdrawing all accident and emergency services from many hospitals – and even now they still can’t decide how to define an A&E
• And, catastrophically, they decided that on the back of the A&E changes they would close virtually the whole of Charing Cross.

Clearly, we could not agree to that.

But as an administration, during the course of the intense scrutiny of the consultation period, we realised that we were going to lose the argument with the NHS to make Charing Cross the major A&E – despite its better geographic location than Chelsea & Westminster, which was the alternative.

So we set about trying to save everything else at Charing Cross that would otherwise have been closed. All the specialist clinics where so many people go for superb treatment. I believe that we succeeded as well as was possible at that stage, and extracted from the NHS a further proposal – call it the Enhanced Option – which they unveiled to the Joint NorthWest London Scrutiny Committee in Febuary 2013:

• We saved the full range of diagnostic facilities, including MRI scanners, computer imaging, endoscopy, ECG and ultrasound.
• We saved the cancer clinic, with cancer diagnostics, chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment.
• We saved the Maggie’s Centre.
• We saved the West London Sexual Health clinic – which does fantastic work with FGM victims
• We saved the Mental Health Clinic.
• We saved the Imperial College teaching facilities.

The essence of all this was formally agreed at the February 2013 meeting of the JCPCT (Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts) which was the formal commissioning body, where this enhanced option together with the original basic option was formally agreed as a single package.

However the latest proposals seem to represent a step backwards. I am personally very disappointed.  I acknowledge these latest plans are still hugely better than the total closure we were originally faced with. But they do appear to represent a retreat from what was agreed last year. We need urgent assurances as to their implications.