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Readers back campaign

Jeni Harvey
25/ 5/2006

OUR CAMPAIGN to save essential services at North Manchester General Hospital got into full swing this week as hundreds of people from all over the area signed the Middleton & North Manchester Guardian's petitions.

The petitions, asking the Joint Committee of PCTs to keep Accident and Emergency, maternity and children's services at North Manchester General rather than locating them at Fairfield Hospital in Bury, have been put in shops around the town centre and signatures are already flooding in.

In addition, readers have also been sending in the Hands Off Our Hospitals coupon published in last week's Guardian to mark their support.

Former township chairman Peter Williams has written to the chairman of Middleton and Heywood PCT to express dismay at the board's decision to go against the NHS's preferred option, was to keep services at North Manchester.

He pointed out that, by recommending services are located in Bury, the PCT is going back on the promise made to Middletonians long ago to provide paediatric services at North Manchester upon the closure of Booth Hall.

Mr Williams criticised the board for "going through the motions of a consultation and then moving the goalposts".

He said: "I am aware there are elements who, for their own reason, support paediatric facilities at Fairfield. However, this suggestion would leave one of the most deprived areas of the greater Manchester conurbation in North Manchester without easy access to the maternity and paediatric care that they presently have."

Mr Williams also said that locating services at Fairfield would leave them "to all intents and purposes inaccessible for the majority of people" as Fairfield is "on the outskirts rather than at the heart of the Greater Manchester conurbation and up what is little more than a country lane".

He said: "By contrast, North Manchester straddles four arterial routes into the city centre, is within easy reach of large populations being close to the M60, and is also close to the inner orbital route of Queens Road - linking North Manchester's deprived communities to the hospital.

"The decision by the PCT seems to have been a last minute stab at a problem with the consequences not being properly thought through.

"Just one example would be the acknowledged problem of teenage pregnancy in the North Manchester area - I do not think a constructive part of a solution is to remove maternity and paediatric facilities."