Open letter to Marianne Griffiths, CEO of Western Sussex NHS Hospitals Trust.

It is three years since the Service Redesign for Quality consultation was carried out, and when Western Sussex NHS Hospitals Trust was not a foundation hospital, and there was no such thing as the Coastal West Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group.

The report identified that the future of Southlands Hospital was a concern of people resident in the Adur and Shoreham area.

On February 1 2012 you were invited to a public meeting at the Shoreham Community Centre along with the local MP for East Worthing and Shoreham where you experienced first hand the feeling among local people about the need to keep Southlands as a community asset, compelling the MP to call upon you to listen to what the local people were saying.

And yet in June 2013, the board announced that it was proposing to demolish the Harness Block, the central core of the hospital, while continuing to decant services from Southlands; other proposals from the Service Redesign for Quality consultation have been set aside or ignored as the hospital is, in my opinion, systematically run down.

The SRfQ consultation had a section concerning inpatient beds which referred to making better use of existing beds, with a pledge to ‘retain the ability to increase the number of beds in its hospitals to deal with additional demand at peak times for example, in the winter months.’ And yet at the board meeting in June 2014 there was concern expressed about the increases in referrals and admissions.

Perhaps if you were not intent on winding up Southlands Hospital, and eliminating that part of the hospital where more beds could be made available, perhaps you would not be in this situation, whether in the winter months or on the threshold of summer.

Sussex Defend the NHS calls upon you to withdraw your proposal to demolish the Harness Block. We demand that you organise another review of services and take steps to make sure that the consultation is more genuine.

SJ Guy Sussex Defend the NHS