Where is our new hospital?
When will the government stop prevaricating and hand over the promised £500m to be spent on hospital provision for Epsom, Ashtead, Leatherhead and Ewell?
Our local healthcare trust has roughly the same number of beds per 1,000 people as in Chile and Colombia. So it’s about time the government delivered on their promises.
Earlier this year, the money for the new emergency hospital at Sutton was reconfirmed but we’ve still seen no progress - so another empty promise?
The new hospital, which geographically falls between Epsom and St Helier, promises to concentrate key emergency services in one place, ensuring that residents get higher quality acute care in a more modern hospital. Both Epsom and St Helier hospitals can then be improved to offer better and more modern facilities.
But nothing has happened thanks to Government wrangling over standardising all new hospitals.
The end result is that delays in starting the Sutton project have meant costs have soared.
Epsom has greater hospital bed deprivation than all the major European countries of the EU and many non-European countries. Germany with 7.82 hospital beds per thousand people ranks third in the world. This is in stark contrast to our underfunded NHS which has 2.43 beds per thousand people, so ranks 32nd.
The national picture is bad enough, but Epsom & Ewell fares even worse than the UK average with just 1.9 beds per thousand people. I witnessed this myself recently in Epsom hospital - such is the pressure on beds that I was still waiting for my lift home as another patient arrived on the ward in my bed place.
No wonder waiting lists have soared.
If elected, I will campaign tirelessly not only to get Epsom & Ewell’s healthcare, at the very least, up to the UK average, but also to fight for greater investment in our staff and crumbling hospitals.