St Georges Healthcare Trust has launched a public consultation into the proposed transfer of the Wolfson Neurological Rehabilitation Centre at Wimbledon. The proposal would relocate the majority of those services currently provided at the Wolfson Neurorehabilitation Centre, Wimbledon to Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton. Patients requiring more complex care provided would be treated in a dedicated neurorehabilitation facility to be based at St George’s Hospital, Tooting.
It is expected that work at Queen Mary’s to accommodate the transferred facility would take 18 – 24 months and, in the interim period, the Trust would relocate 26 of the 32 Wolfson beds onto a vacant ward at St George’s Hospital and the remaining six beds to Queen Mary’s. The Trust states that the six beds would take up 4 ”under-utilised”** beds and 2 beds that are shared between different departments in the hospital.
** It is understood that that the 4 “under-utilised” beds were Douglas Bader Amputee beds in the Gwynne Holford Ward. At the public meeting held on 14th December, it was reported that 14 amputee inpatients were on the ward utilising the 2 ‘swing’ beds because of the amputee bed demand. This would suggest that the St.Georges Healthcare NHS Trust statement about “under-utilisation” is unreliable.
Consultation Exercise
The second of two public consultation meetings takes place at 7pm, Wednesday 14th December 2011 in the Barnes and Richmond rooms at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton Lane, Roehampton, London, SW15 5PN. Please come along and make your views known.
For further information, please click here to access the consultation website and also click here to read a report prepared by Christopher Harwood Chairperson, Roehampton Limb User Group (RLUG)
Update – 15.12.11
At the meeting, it became apparent that the consultation process followed by St Georges Healthcare NHS Trust was seriously flawed in that no consultation contact was made with any of the amputee charities i.e. the Limbless Association, BLESMA, Douglas Bader Foundation or Limbcare. In addition, RLUG was not notified even though the public consultation exercise commenced on 28 November 2011. Indeed, RLUG only became aware of the fact by discovering the public consultation on the St Georges Healthcare NHS Trust website on 5 December.
RLUG, Limbless Association and Limbcare all challenged the validity of the Consultation as did the majority of those present. The senior managers involved in presenting the public consultation were advised to stop the present process and to restart the consultation.
We would seek to halt this consultation and recommence with a full consultation process of 12 weeks as opposed to the 4 weeks being undertaken by the Trust. Thereby the whole amputee community may be consulted.
We are looking for as many people to get behind Roehampton and to sign this petition to show the Department of Health we do care and that we want a fair consultation to get all our views across.
Please click on the link below to show your suport by signing this petition.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/26030
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