Urgent Care Centre decision is short sighted

Anne Main comments on last night's meeting to discuss the cancellation of the planned Urgent Care Centre at St Albans.

She said:

“Simon Rouse and Andrew Parker, from the Primary Care Trust (PCT), hid behind incomprehensible jargon and did not to put forward an easily understood argument why an Urgent Care Centre was no longer the correct model for the needs of residents in St Albans.

“It didn’t appear to me that the PCT was planning for the future, which I believe is very short sighted. We were given no facts and figures to support this new decision, and no detail on costings. They simply made it clear that they believed they couldn’t justify the funding.

“Their argument seemed to revolve around the fact that too much money has been spent on acute services elsewhere. But St Albans is growing, we have been obliged to take many extra new homes in the area, and yet we have fewer services than we had ten years ago. My constituents were given no evidence that the scrapped proposed facility would not still ultimately be the correct one for the local population. Surely common sense dictates that if the PCT said we needed more services on the site 12 months ago, then we still do now.

“The PCT’s argument was that too many people are still going to acute services like A&E, so they believe that this shows that not enough people would use an Urgent Care Centre in St Albans. This conclusion shows a complete lack of understanding of the dilemma facing our city, namely that people go out of St Albans to other centres because we do not have appropriate services within the District. Based on this thinking we will never justify an Urgent Care Centre in St Albans. As far as I’m concerned, they have simply changed their minds due to lack of money and they are struggling to justify the decision. There is no other way of looking at it.

“I still believe that a form of Urgent Care Centre, correctly planned and promoted, would prove to be a set of services that people in St Albans would use. Nobody wants to hang around in an A&E unless they absolutely have to. We should be keeping, enhancing and promoting local services.

“I understand that the Urgent Care Centres were intended to move people away from unnecessary visits to A&E, and the PCT representatives told us last night that there have been incidents of people going to the centres instead of to their GP. However, they gave us no figures to prove this argument. They simply ask us to believe that the example of the Cheshunt Urgent Care Centre has demonstrated a definite usage trend, rather than freeing up acute services, as they had planned. It appears that St Albans is being penalised because they haven’t got the Cheshunt Model working and promoted correctly.

“If the PCT is trying to get people out of Acute Services and into more appropriate services, then we need to provide those services locally. I was not convinced they couldn’t do this in St Albans and that our centre wouldn’t work exactly as it was envisaged it should in the first place. Yet again, St Albans has been misled and short changed. We need extra services locally and I shall continue to fight for them.”