Campaign group Beds For Badger gathers support with petition being taken to House of Commons in January
THE people of Shipston have sworn to fight on to make the dream of a new hospital in the town a reality.
A new campaign group, Beds For Badger (B4B), is seeking government intervention and taking a petition to the House of Commons in January.
B4B deputy chair John Dinnie said: “We have renewed vigour after hearing how the people of Bishop’s Castle got their NHS foundation trust to backtrack on the closure of their hospital.
“And members have been inspired after attending the Community Hospital Association Conference recently.”
The group is currently campaigning to get signatures for the parliamentary petition.
MP Manuela Perteghella will present it to parliament, with the main target being health secretary Wes Streeting.
“The new Labour government have said they wish to invest in and reform the NHS,” said Mr Dinnie. “The Integrated Ellen Badger Community Hospital as planned in 2019 is the right investment and the right reform to reduce health inequalities in rural south Warwickshire.”
There was fury last month after the county council approved Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care Board’s plans for its public consultation on whether south Warwickshire’s 35 community beds should be at three locations (Shipston, Stratford and Leamington), or just two, leaving out Shipston.
However, there was no option that included a new Shipton hospital with its own beds, instead the report considered the viability of situating beds at the remaining ward of the half-demolished old hospital.
Many pointed out it seemed a foregone conclusion that this would be considered a no-go.
The campaign group, chaired by Shipston businessman Alasdair Elliott, believes the ICB should be considering more options. Most fundamentally they want to see the original 2019 plans for a fully integrated hospital with beds back on the table, which is what the petition calls for.
A team of B4B volunteers, led by co-ordinator Carole Gibbs, has been going out gathering signatures, knocking door to door.
She says the support has been heartfelt and unanimous.
“Part of our campaign is to petition our community to gain as much local support as possible.
“To date we have quite a few volunteers knocking on doors and some businesses in town and some of the villages also have petitions for customers to sign. This has only been up and running for just over a week but the support so far is excellent.
“People are really angry about the demolishing of our lovely old hospital which has been replaced with a new building, looming large over Stratford Road, with no beds and as yet uncertainty about what, if any, medical facilities there will be,” said Mrs Gibbs.
“They recall that the old hospital was not only gifted to the town by a local benefactor but it provided beds, physio, x-ray, minor injury and consultant facilities, now gone and maybe not to be replaced.”
The ICB and South Warwickshire NHS University Foundation Trust maintain that more people from places such as Warwick and Leamington were using the beds than locals in the past, and therefore beds should be located closer to the populations with more need. However, despite numerous requests from the Herald and others, the ICB would not make public the data that found this and allow it to be better scrutinised.
Campaigner, Maggie Goren told the Herald: “Most EBH patients were from my experience predominately local residents in their eighties and nineties for whom nursing at home was no longer possible. My own mother died there aged 71 following a severe stroke and thrombosis.
“We have hugely increasing populations in our rural towns and villages. At the minimal NHS authority’s stated need for 2.5 beds per thousand population in the UK (average five in Europe), that would mean 387 hospital beds being available for a current 155,000 population in Stratford and Shipston alone. SWFT has left Stratford with 22 overnight beds in one ward only and now it seems SWFT has decided their ‘health and wellbeing centre’ under construction in Shipston needs no beds.”
SWFT said so far the development of Ellen Badger had cost £5.31m, against a budget £8.2m. Shipston Medical Centre has yet to confirm if it will be moving to the site, but says it is “exploring options”.
The parliamentary petition cannot be signed online. Copies can be found in Shipston town centre businesses, and the Herald has a copy in our offices on Guild Street, Stratford. For further information email chair@bedsforbadger.org or go online at bedsforbadger.org.