7:35pm Monday 21st July 2008
By Linda Piper
A DECISION has been made by health chiefs on the future of hospitals in the area.
The joint committee of the primary care trusts for Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham met today in London to make its decision on the A Picture of Health proposals.
And it agreed with recommendations to approve an amended version of option two from the three original options put forward.
This will see Queen Mary's Hospital as the only major loser of the four hospitals involved.
The Sidcup hospital will lose all its emergency services, including A&E, maternity and in-patient children's services, but will become one of two centres for planned surgery.
The planned surgery unit at Orpington Hospital will close and patients from there diverted to Queen Mary's.
The Sidcup hospital will also have to wait for a decision on whether it will be able to open a midwife-led birthing unit.
Queen Mary's will be left with an urgent care centre, community, diagnostic, specialist walk-in care such as renal dialysis, cardiology, neurology and cancer; outpatient services; day surgery; intermediate in-patient care and rehabilitation including beds and services.
This may open the way for the sell-off of large parts of the Sidcup hospital site, which could help pay for the millions of pounds of debt owed by the other three private finance initiative (PFI) hospitals involved.
The Princess Royal University Hospital in Farnborough and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich will remain as the two centres for acute services in outer south east London and will keep their day surgery units.
Under the amended option two, Lewisham Hospital will keep its A&E, but it will only be open to surgical emergencies from 8am to 8pm.
It will keep its pediatric and maternity services but only due to the intervention of the Academic Health Sciences Centre, made up of Guys and St Thomas's, Kings College and South London and Maudsley trusts.
They offered support to Lewisham to maintain the services but will take more complex surgical cases for children.
Lewisham will also keep its day surgery.
It is estimated that keeping day surgery at all four centres will bring in £10m a year.
The original option two was only supported by 1,491 of the 8,374 people who gave an opinion on the consultation.
The most popular option was option one which attracted 1,949 supporters.
But 2,491 people, mainly from Bexley, indicated they did not like any of the options put forward.
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