Q&A is a meet and grate

3:35pm Monday 12th December 2005

Residents demand answers from hospital bosses before descending on Chase Farm.

Health bosses argued their case for change at a meeting on Saturday morning prior to a public rally to save threatened services at Chase Farm Hospital.

They said, in the long-term, they did not believe it was sustainable to offer every hospital service at both the Chase Farm and Barnet General Hospital sites.

Around 50 people attended the meeting at Eastfield Primary School in Eastfield Road, organised by Enfield North MP, Joan Ryan.

Representatives from the hospital trust and the primary care trust spelled out their reasons for proposing a downgrading of casualty services at Chase Farm.

The introduction of the working-time directive - in which doctors are legally bound to work less hours - means that the hospital faces a shortage of specialist doctors in the long-term.

A&E consultant Geoff Hinchley said: "At the moment, we have duplicate services at Barnet and Chase Farm, but with the working-time directive we need to increase the number of doctors we have.

"We don't want to be responsible for services going backwards, and we think that will be the case if we leave things as they are."

Simon Weldon, project director for clinical strategy at the trust, said change was necessary: "We have to meet our workforce problems, it has to be affordable, and it has to deliver a vision for services that we feel happy with."

But residents and Ms Ryan argued that the possible downgrading would be disastrous for patient care and would have a knock-on effect on nearby hospitals.

Beth Pedder, of Enfield Lock, said: "People are desperately worried that Edmonton's North Middlesex Hospital will collapse because most people from the eastern corridor will travel there, particularly if they don't have a car, and it has not budgeted for a loss of services at Chase Farm."

Ms Ryan said: "We accepted that breast cancer services would move to Barnet and oncology to Chase Farm, but that was not a loss of services, it was a change to the way they were arranged, but I don't think that automatically means we need to go down the road of total downgrading."