Top Tory fights to save clinic named after her
TRANSFERRING psychiatric care from hospitals to the community ‘is a policy we can all support — but not at the cost of leaving a large population without any inpatient care’.
These words crystallise the widespread opposition to health chiefs’ plans to close Burton’s Margaret Stanhope Centre and were spoken this week by the Tory councillor who gave the unit its name.
Margaret Stanhope, who represents the Alrewas and Fradley ward on Lichfield District Council, deployed the argument to successfully persuade the authority to scrap its backing for the closure proposal and to oppose it instead.
In a speech to a council committee, Councillor Stanhope, who is also the authority’s cabinet member for democratic and legal services, said the proposals ‘would leave Burton and its district, South Derbyshire and a large portion of Lichfield district without any inpatient mental health facility’.
Arguing the proposals, put forward by South Staffordshire Primary Care Trust and South Staffordshire and Shropshire NHS Foundation Trust, had provoked ‘outrage’, she said: “I have never known an issue that has united people in the way the campaign to keep the centre open has.”
Councillor Stanhope said ‘great concern’ about the plans had been voiced by current and ex-patients, their carers and families, who were all asking ‘where will patients go and how far will we be expected to travel?’.
Politicians from all parties and police had opposed the plans and ‘so important’ was the issue that it had been discussed in Parliament, she said, prompting an extension to the consultation.
“I suspect the decision was due to the conflicting claims made by the trusts and their failure to take into account the grave impact closing the centres would have,” Councillor Stanhope said.
She added that although mental health was the NHS’s ‘poor relation’ and was ‘stigmatised’, many people would suffer from it — a fact brought into sharp relief by the further pressure which would be exerted on services from house building plans.
But South Staffordshire already had fewer than half the average number of mental health beds and occupancy rates were high, prompting concerns about what fate would befall patients if the cuts were made she said in her speech Councillor Stanhope said contrary to health chiefs’ claims, Burton’s unit was tailor-made for patients and met official guidelines.
Most patients there had to be detained under law, and closing the Margaret Stanhope would drain police resources and force officers to put their charges in cells, she said.
As excellent as community care might be, there were times when people ‘needed to go into hospital, as near to home as possible’ and with the support of their carers, families and friends, which would ‘not be easy’ if they had to travel long distances, she added.
After the committee backed her stance, Councillor Stanhope said she was ‘absolutely delighted with the result’ and doubted it would be overturned by the authority’s cabinet or full council.
