Please sign open Letter to West Yorkshire and Harrogate Joint Health Scrutiny Committee – scrutinise NHS cuts plans before it’s too late!

If you agree with this letter, at the bottom please sign your name in the comments box, with your campaign group name if you’re in one and would like to add it.

If you’d like to use this as a template, to amend as you see fit and send from yourself as an individual, or from your own campaign group, you can download it here.

There’s more info here about why we’re urgently asking the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Joint Health Overview Scrutiny Committee to meet. It’s also explained in the background info for the Scrutiny Committee Councillors, which will be sent as an attachment to the letter.

Dear West Yorkshire and Harrogate Joint Health Overview Scrutiny Committee Councillors,

We ask you to meet as a matter of urgency, to scrutinise the activities of the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Sustainability and Transformation Partnership Joint Clinical Commissioning Committee – in particular, to

• Ask the Joint Clinical Commissioning Committtee and the individual clinical commissioning groups to present all and any legal advice they have received about the lawfulness or otherwise of the JCCC’s decision making and disputes resolution processes, as laid out in the Memorandum of Understanding.
• Thoroughly scrutinise the clinical evidence base and the material resources required for the proposed centralisation/reconfiguration of West Yorkshire and Harrogate Hyper-Acute Stroke Services.

At issue are: first, the lawfulness of individual Clinical Commissioning Group’s abandonment of their responsibilities to their local communities, in favour of STP-wide commissioning that could lead to STP commissioning decisions that are binding on them, even if they disagree and the joint STP decisions are bad for their local area.

Relatedly, how can Clinical Commissioning Groups’ patient and public engagement and consultations be lawful, when STP commissioning would mean they are not in control of the outcome of the matters that they are engaging/consulting on? -ie if the consultation result says one thing and the joint STP commissioning decides on another?

Second, the un-evidenced centralisation of hyper acute stroke services (potentially an example of the issue just identifed above) urgently requires scrutiny. When the WYH Joint Health Scrutiny Committee considered this in January 2017, they failed to identify the lack of clinical evidence for the proposal and to scrutinise the necessary community resources it implies.

More detailed background info on both issues is attached

Yours,
……