Copy of a letter to Edward Colgan, chief executive of Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, about Shepton Mallet Community Hospital.

I write in connection with your on-going review of community health services in Shepton Mallet and surrounding area.

I am a retired general medical practitioner from the Grove House Surgery in Shepton Mallet and for 35 years I attended the Shepton Mallet District Hospital and its successor, Shepton Mallet Community Hospital.

I retired in 1997 and now live in West Pennard, between Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury, and am still registered with my old surgery. I have been a supplier of healthcare and am now a potential recipient of it.

Any notional economy made by your trust would be also partly offset by the increased travel costs to relatives visiting their loved ones in Bath, Bristol, Yeovil or Taunton. Public transport in our area is scarce and becoming scarcer, and is costly and time consuming. Motor fuel is increasingly expensive.

Again, the costs would simply be shifted elsewhere, this time to members of the community.

I call upon your review body to consider most seriously the alternative of upgrading the Shepton Mallet Community Hospital by building long-awaited and long-promised replacements for the current “temporary” buildings and continuing with the present excellent and cost-effective service.

I understand that Shepton Mallet Community Hospital had a bed-occupancy rate of around 96 per cent last month. It must be that the cost of a bed at Shepton Mallet Community Hospital is less than that of a bed at the district general hospitals in Bath, Bristol, Yeovil and Taunton.

At present all of these hospitals have the ability to transfer their convalescent patients to Shepton Mallet Community Hospital, thus freeing beds for more seriously ill patients.

In the absence of Shepton Mallet Community Hospital, patients would be either sent home prematurely, to their possible detriment, or block a more expensive bed. An economy made by your trust would not be an economy at all: it would merely shift the cost to another part of the NHS. Surely this would not be a desirable outcome?

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The review of Shepton Mallet Community Hospital’s inpatient facilities is taking place at the moment and will be followed by a three-month consultation period during which the community will have the chance to have their say. There has been an outcry from the local community over the possible loss of the beds, which are used by patients from all over mid Somerset.

Major John Elwood, 84, of Tadley Acres, Shepton Mallet, was an inpatient at the hospital twice last year, when he suffered from oedema after being treated for a broken hip. He was transferred to Shepton Mallet Community Hospital from Bath Royal United Hospital.

There is no guarantee that they will be there when needed. My experience is that they are efficient when there but you have no idea when they will be coming. I had to rely on my wife. Many elderly people in Shepton Mallet live on their own. If we rely on community nurses a doctor would have to come out to patient’s homes instead of seeing them on a ward round.

The petition to save the hospital’s beds has gathered more than 1,555 signatures and continues to grow. Petition sheets are available at the reception area of the hospital as well as at several businesses in the town including

Hospitals have been warned to end the ‘obviously unacceptable’ practice of sending home vulnerable patients in the middle of the night.
Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the Medical Director of the NHS, has written to Strategic Health Authorities urging them to ‘urgently’ review their practices after it emerged hundreds of thousands of patients are sent home between 11pm and 6am.

Sir Bruce will be meeting SHA medical directors next month to take stock of progress.
Freedom of Information requests by The Times discovered that, out of 100 NHS trusts, 239,233 patients had been sent home between 11pm and 6am last year.

Promise: Sir Bruce Keogh, has pledged to look into the figures to ensure patients are sent home only when it is ‘appropriate, safe and convenient’
If all other trusts were discharging at similar rates, this would add up to 400,000 such discharges every year, almost 8,000 a week.
The Patients Association said it received several calls a week from distressed relatives whose loved ones had been sent home unexpectedly often in their nightwear.

Last year, the Care Quality Commission found a fifth of NHS hospitals were breaking the law on care for the elderly, while 40% did not offer dignified care.

Sir Bruce wrote: ‘While some patients may of course choose to be discharged during these hours, the examples highlighted of elderly patients being left to make their way home by themselves in the middle of the night are obviously unacceptable, and need to be addressed urgently.

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