MOST of us who live in the north of Horsham district will feel strongly about the provision of effective, efficient health facilities that fully serve the local area.
The rally held on the Forum on May 17 calling for a 'New Hospital Now' demonstrated how passionately people feel about this issue.
All of us who have families, those who are getting older, expectant mothers and carers must at one time or anoth
er have felt that sense of real anxiety over the journey that we might have to make in an emergency. Redhill is a long way from Horsham and the roads can be extremely congested!
Lots of us have heard stories about others who have had the misfortune to use the current service; some of these stories make your hair stand on end! There are too many tales that sound like they come from a Victorian novel by Dickens.
None of us wants to experience long delays or the perils of an overworked and overflowing casualty service. The staff at East Surrey Hospital at Redhill do their best to cope but this cannot make up for departments that are overstretched beyond their capacity.
People who have known Horsham for a number of years will have seen their hospital services eroding before their eyes. Horsham has been short-changed in the provisions that have been made for our emergency health care.
For years the promise of a new hospital at Pease Pottage sustained the community during the loss of maternity and A&E facilities first at Horsham then at Crawley. We believed that a new hospital was part of the greater plan for the whole area and because of this changes have happened without mass protest.
Recently people in the south of the area have quite rightly launched huge campaigns to try to save maternity and A&E services that were suddenly threatened for their own hospitals. To some extent Horsham's plight has been overshadowed by their desperate moves to protect services at Chichester, Guildford, Haywards Heath and Worthing.
The people of Horsham do deserve far more consideration than they have been given and that is why the campaign for a 'New Hospital Now' is something that needs to move forward.
Crawley and Horsham are growth areas where the population has increased and will continue to increase dramatically over the coming years. We have Gatwick Airport in our midst and yet we now have both Crawley and Horsham hospitals without full A&E cover or maternity facilities.
Luckily other provisions for day to day health care are being strengthened which is great but there is still a genuine need for a major new hospital to serve this whole area.
Our local population deserves proper dedicated provision for emergencies. There will be those who feel that the establishment of Worthing as a central major hospital could be considered to offer an alternative to Redhill.
However, for those of us who are stuck in a heavily populated area somewhere in the middle of the two this is of little comfort. The journey to Worthing is also very daunting and the hospital will have a large catchment area that will be extremely demanding.
People need to have the easiest possible access to treatment both for the sake of the patient and for patients' families. It is time that deeper consideration was given to the problems that our local residents have in reaching specialised hospitals.
Over the years it seems that people in Horsham and Crawley have been misled and badly let down. A promised new hospital should have been well underway by now instead of which we are faced with new proposals that fail to recognise the wishes and needs of the community in and around Horsham.
We all need to speak up so that the Government and primary care trust realises how local people feel. If any of us has to face an emergency for ourselves or our loved ones then we should be able to feel confident that appropriate treatment is within easy reach.
CHRISTINE COSTIN
(LDem) Horsham district councillor for Trafalgar ward
Park House, North Street, Horsham
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