LETTER: Travesty of local democracy

This is an open letter to the chairs of the West Sussex Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Committee and the Health and Wellbeing Board.
By The Newsroom
Published 13th Oct 2016, 11:26 BST
Updated 7th Jun 2018, 21:39 BST

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Your letters

Dear Ms Field and Mr Turner,

Having now had a chance to read the West Sussex HWB meeting Agenda for 13 October we are frankly appalled.

Item 9 baldly states: ‘Local Health System Sustainability and Transformation Plans.Report from Coastal Care and the Central Sussex and East Surrey Alliance.The Board will receive verbal reports updating on recent work in support of the draft Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) submitted to NHS England on 30 June.

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‘The Board is asked to assure its influence and support for the final iteration of the Plan for submission on 21 October.’

So it appears you are being asked to provide assurance for a plan you haven’t seen, for which no written papers have been presented, for which there has been no public involvement and after you very clearly expressed a number of issues, doubts and concerns at the July 13th meeting. This seems a travesty of local democracy.

Have all these points been resolved behind the scenes and if so why is there no paper attached to the agenda detailing this? If they haven’t been resolved do you feel a verbal update on Coastal Care/STP can sufficiently assure you that they have been taken on board?

When the STP is finally made public will an extra HWB meeting be called to discuss this? The next scheduled meeting of Feb 2nd 2017 is after NHS England’s planned date for sign-off of contracts relating to the STP in December this year. Will the published STP be further scrutinised by HASC before December?

Jan Birtwell

Coastal West Sussex 38 degrees NHS Group

Zena Dodgson

Crawley and District Keep Our NHS Public

Margaret Guest

Don’t Cut Us Out

Keep Our NHS Public, Tyssen Street, London E8 2LY

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