Nurses who took part in the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony join demonstrators in South-East London yesterday to protest against the proposed closure of the Accident and Emergency (A&E) and maternity units at Lewisham hospital.

 

Guardian News Service /London

Thousands of protesters have marched through south-east London to demand that the government stops the planned closure of a hospital’s accident and emergency department and downgrading of its maternity ward.

Organisers campaigning to save Lewisham hospital said the plans, which would see its emergency department replaced with an “urgent care” ward and its maternity services turned into a midwife-led unit, were “crazy and ill thought out”.

The Save Lewisham Hospital group claimed up to 25,000 people took part in the march, though other estimates put the figure closer to 15,000.

The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is due to decide on the plans by 1 February.

The closures are part of an overhaul proposed by a special administrator after the nearby South London Healthcare NHS Trust (SLHT) went into administration as a result of it losing around £1.3m a week. But SLHT, which runs three hospitals in the capital and was the first NHS trust to collapse, does not have responsibility for Lewisham hospital.

Campaigners said a “successful and well-run” hospital was in danger of being sacrificed due to the neighbouring trust’s failure.

Dr Louise Irvine, a local GP and chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, said: “This decision is crazy and ill thought out. It is a big mistake and carries huge clinical risks of things going wrong for patients, but also political risk.

“If Jeremy Hunt can close a good local hospital here, he can do it anywhere in the country  nowhere is safe. This is very much a national issue, there are 60 hospital trusts across the country under threat of bankruptcy, many of them very good hospitals.”
   A hospital worker has been suspended at the scandal-hit Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust after a baby was found with a dummy taped to his face.

Staffordshire Police confirmed that officers were investigating a complaint about a staff member at Stafford Hospital and were liaising with the baby’s family and the NHS trust.

The four-month-old boy was unharmed in the incident which happened earlier this month.  The incident is a severe embarrassment to the trust, coming 10 days before the launch of the report of a public inquiry into poor standards of care which went undetected for years.

Up to 1,200 more patients died than would have been expected over a three-year period, in 2005-08, at the trust in one of the worst NHS scandals.

The £13m inquiry, chaired by Robert Francis QC, is the biggest into healthcare and is expected to send shockwaves through the NHS.

The scandal was exposed in a report by NHS regulators, the Healthcare Commission, in 2009, and the trust, with new managers, has since improved its standards of care and has a low death rate.

But Monitor, the foundation trust regulator, ruled earlier this month that the trust was “clinically and financially unsustainable” after it was revealed it would need a subsidy of £73m over the next five years to keep it afloat.

In a speech last November, Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, highlighted Mid-Staffordshire as an exemplar of the “crisis in care”.