The Tories and the hospital site 1

Entry on this website 2nd Dec 2006:

Follow this link to support the campaign to save Surbiton Hospital. http://www.surreycomet.co.uk/surbitonshospital/. The three of us are totally committed to seeing the Hospital survive and develop into a ‘state of the art’ health care facility for Surbiton. We are also very concerned that the perilous financial position of our Primary Care Trust is still putting our hospital’s future at risk. We also hear that some in government believe there’s ‘too much hospital provision in this part of London’.

Entry on this website 13th Dec 2006:

Though we have in the past been given undertakings that the future of the Hospital is not under long term threat, this further burden on the PCT’s finances cannot but cause more anxiety about the future.

We will continue to campaign, as we always have, for the retention of the Hospital site by the NHS and its upgrading to a ‘state of the art’ medical facility for the people of Surbiton.

This elicited the following comment from Paul Sloan an apparent Lib Dem supporter:

What’s the point of every little nook and cranny having its own hospital?
It’s no distance from Surbiton to Kingston Hospital.
Why not sell the site for housing (its a superb prime site right by the station), and reinvest the money either
1. by centralising facilities in Kingston.
2. rebuilding somewhere cheaper.
The same goes for that old peoples home on Browns road. It’s an inefficeint use of a prime site. Sell it and put in somewhere cheaper like the back of berrylands, or tolworth.

To which we responded:

……….. Surbiton is not a ‘little nook or cranny’. We entirely appreciate that some services need the concentrated resources of a big sub-regional hospital like Kingston. But minor surgical procedures, convalescent facilities, physiotherapy should be available closer to patients’ homes. We have advocated a redevelopment which would embrace the services formerly provided in Surbiton with the addition, among other things, of the possible relocation of GP facilities from Oakhill, which is bursting at the seams. ….

So you see that we have never wanted to sell off the site either of the hospital or ‘that old people’s home in Browns Road (Newent House). But there were others who did.

If you want further evidence of the consistent approach of Surbiton Hill’s former Conservative Councillors on this issue I can provide it, or you can find it for yourself on this website.

Much more of the stuff the Fib Dem candidate and his agent are putting out, including in their latest spectacular work of fiction, will have them looking like Pinocchio.