From: John Cornell   GP
Subject: Hospital closures for child heart surgery services

I really think the whole exercise has been a cosmetic one and hence a waste of public money.

It is perfectly obvious that all the people who use any of the centres and the local people around those centres will want “their centre” kept open. The general public are not in a position to make a reasoned judgement against all the criteria that need to be considered to make the best decision. Of course people would sign petitions to support their positions. To be told that they are being consulted and then told that it is too big an issue to be decided by the size of a petition is rather disingenuous. I suspect that even some of the professional responses are motivated from a personal involvement rather than purely objective reasoning. Of course it is too big an issue to be decided in any other way than an objective independent assessment and so we should never get into these positions.

The committee needs to have its independence ratified by those affected by the decision (it must be seen to be independent with no vested interests of its own) so that its final judgement is likely to be accepted. It can then set out the arguments objectively to support the need for change and then set specific criteria against which a judgement is to be made and these criteria could have been consulted on and modified as necessary. The panel should then gather all the hard, objective evidence for each site against each criteria and make a judgment on the basis of that and hence be able to justify their decision in an objective way.

I feel the way in which the public are led to believe they are being consulted on these national issues, (particularly when anyone with any common sense could predict what local communities are going to say / want),  and then to blatantly indicate that local views are being ignored is hypocritical to say the least. The cost in terms of time and resources put into conducting the exercise and diverted away from clinical care could have been far more usefully channelled into services and patient care.

Why is this approach continually replicated?

Professionals are paid to make difficult decisions – so long as they are seen and assessed to be open, transparent and fair - then it is surely OK for them to do it, instead of this pretence at democracy and public consultation.