One stroke and out
The story behind the consultation into Somerset stroke services. Has NHS Somerset been entirely candid? Have they delayed publication of the results? We investigate.
Somerset Confidential® special SC35
Dear readers
Today’s Somerset Confidential® is for our paying subscribers. We hope you find it interesting. If you’d like to get more material like this you can subscribe for it here:
At Somerset Confidential®, we see our work as a public service reporting the news and providing as much of our journalism as we can free of charge. So you can subscribe for our regular articles free of charge.
However we still have some bills to pay! And we would like to do more, indeed we need to do more. Pieces like today’s story need more in depth research (over 400 pages of it as it turns out!). And that costs more too.
If you feel able to help us, we’ve set a paid subscription rate at £30 per annum. That’s 58p per edition, or 25% of the price of a cup of tea at Starbucks. And for that we’ll throw in some additional benefits.
Two extra exclusive articles each month for subscribers (like today’s piece - so some value for money right there!)
Full access to our back catalogue.
Comment and have your say on anything we write.
And experience the satisfaction of supporting the most innovative, public-service journalism project in Somerset.
Think of it like this. Support us – and support a better governed Somerset. You can join and support us here….
Thank you
Andrew Lee - editor
One Stroke and Out
The full story from that Somerset stroke consultation
We have been here before.
When Fit For My Future pitched the idea of moving mental health beds from Wells to Yeovil the public were unimpressed. So having run a consultation, once they realised they had received the wrong answer, they ignored it and went ahead and did what they planned to do in the first place.
At the end of 2022 NHS Somerset announced plans to close the Hyper Acute Stroke Service HASU) in Yeovil and move it to Taunton. Concerns all over south and east Somerset have been expressed about the plans. Especially once it became obvious that the preferred option for NHS Somerset was to close all stroke services, not just the HASU, in Yeovil and move them to Taunton.
However they are obligated, as part of their process, to run a consultation. That took place in spring 2023. If you want to read more of the background to the consultation and proposals, you can find it in our article Yeovil Without
Before we go any further, let us pause for a moment to acknowledge a problem with consultations. Yes it is always good to find out what the public want. It is perhaps idealistic to ask that every public authority making a decision should be able to show they consulted with the public first.
There is no point having a public consultation if you do not listen to what the public are telling you. Equally though, the public are not experts. And sometimes it can be dangerous to invite public opinion on complex or technical issues.
So before we look at the outcome of this consultation, we acknowledge that there is a difficult balance between respecting the public view and making a technically valid decision.
That said, back to the consultation in hand. In November 2023 the summary of the consultation on stroke services was published with the November board papers for NHS Somerset. It was so vague and lacking in numbers, that we suspected that once again NHS Somerset had been given the wrong answer by the public.
But the next board meeting, the one at which NHS Somerset said they would take a decision on the stroke service was due to be at the end of January 2024. Just two moths o from November. Surely it was not possible that they would delay publication of the detail until it was so close to the decision date, that no proper scrutiny could take place by press and public?