THE fate of Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, has been sealed.

Within two years, the Sidcup hospital site in Frognal Avenue, orginally created in 1917, will become a “health campus” and a centre for planned surgery.

All the trappings of an acute hospital, Accident and Emergency, maternity unit and in-patient paediatric care will be removed.

Instead, people in Bexley will have to look to Farnborough, Woolwich or Lewisham for their future treatment.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson dashed the hopes of all those fighting to save emergency services at the hospital, by backing the findings of the Independent Reconfiguration Panel (IRP) which was asked to look at the A Picture of Health (APOH) recommendations for hospital care in south east London.

Bexley Council and the joint scrutiny committee of councillors from the affected boroughs were both unhappy with the APOH proposals and referred them to Mr Johnson who called in the panel.

Panel members visited the A&E departments at all four affected hospitals - Queen Mary’s, Princess Royal University (PRU) in Farnborough, Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich and University Hospital Lewisham - all of which they described as “busy”.

They found conditions in Woolwich “cramped and unable to provide staff teaching or changing facilities” and said clinicians there stressed the need for expansion.

Lewisham, they said, was the most in need of modernisation and development, with cubicals sub-divided by curtains because of the volume of patients, resulting in a lack of privacy.

Despite this, the panel backed plans to close Queen Mary’s A&E.

It said four A&E departments in the area was not sustainable and there were currently not enough consultants to staff them.

It said Queen Mary’s had two A&E consultants instead of the recommended four and lack of staff meant it would not be possible to create an acute medical unit at Sidcup to back up A&E.

Instead Queen Mary’s will keep its on-site Urgent Care Centre which will be expanded to open 24 hours.

The panel also recommended further work with the London Ambulance Service to confirm how many extra blue-light ambulances will be needed to ferry A&E cases to other hospitals.

APOH will do further work on expanding A&E capacity at Farnborough, Lewisham and Woolwich.

Queen Mary’s will keep its stand-alone midwife-led birthing unit, but its in-patient maternity unit will close.

The panel said while there was praise for the quality of the services and fears about being able to access services at Farnborough or Woolwich, the Sidcup building was in poor condition and there were not sufficient consultants to staff units at all four hospitals.

There were concerns about the ability of Woolwich and PRU to cope with the additional 3,000 births a year from Queen Mary’s.

But the panel said Darent Valley Hospital, Dartford, could take up to 750 Bexley births a year.

Queen Mary’s neonatal unit will also close, despite the panel noting “physical capacity is very constrained with all units, other than Queen Mary’s, overcrowded”.

Queen Mary’s also acts as an overflow for Woolwich which has said it does not yet know where the extra babies will go.

In-patient paediatric services will also disappear from Sidcup, with the panel backing the view that medical staff in this specialty are spread too thinly and admissions are falling.

Darent Valley estimates it will take up to 850 emergency children’s admissions and 50 planned admissions from Bexley.

Sidcup will keep a walk-in children’s care service but the panel did not back pressure for overnight observation beds.

The panel said APOH should consider keeping children’s cancer services at Sidcup and look again at plans to carry out non-complex children’s surgery at all four hospitals.