Darnall Community Health New NHS Medical Centre Delayed Opening Until Late 2011
Local / Sheffield Jun 08, 2010 - 01:32 AM GMTBy: N_Walayat
The patients of Darnall having to put up with Sheffield's bottom ranking GP services (as per the Department of Health Funded UK GP Patient Survey) have been eagerly awaiting the development of a New Darnall Medical Centre that was given the go ahead in September last year that had construction work planned to commence early 2010 at the Darnall Main Road site.
However the construction site as of today remains untouched as the below photo illustrates. Commencement of building work is still awaiting final signing off from the Strategic Health Authority (NHS Yorkshire & the Humber) which is not to likely to happen during the next 3 months, which means that the earliest construction can commence is during late 2010 and therefore the earliest that the centre can be expected to be completed by is Mid 2011, though more probably by late 2011, so still well over a year away.
The New Darnall Medical Centre build will cost an estimated £5.5 million which will seek to house the existing Darnall Community Health GP surgery services at Darnall Road and York Road. The centre is being built under the NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) Development Scheme which is a private / public partnership that is tasked with dragging the NHS front line services into the 21st century by means of construction of new integrated one stop shop Super Surgeries premises along the lines of the 2009 unveiling of the City Centre GP Walk in Centre (Sheffield GP Super Surgery Polyclinic NHS Healthcare Centre).
This will be great news for the people of Darnall when the new medical centre is actually opened for patient use, however it will still be a case of being very late in arrival at over 7 years AFTER the first LIFT facilities were first completed. However there exists a flaw in the implementation of the plan and that is that the keys to the new centre will be handed over to the staff of the existing surgeries. In business the tendency is to recruit the best workers as evidenced by their track record in actual delivery, where the NHS is concerned the opposite appears to be true as evidenced by the table of Sheffield's 91 GP surgeries.
The keys to the new £5.5 million will be handed over to the exiting surgeries that rank 91st and 90th out of the 91 Sheffield GP surgeries. Perhaps the people of Darnall would have been far better served if the staff from Sheffield's BEST ranked surgeries were recruited to come and work in Darnall, otherwise I am afraid the whole exercise my amount to a wasted opportunity at huge tax payer expense.
In the final analysis the £5.5 million is tax payer money that requires that the Sheffield PCT ensures that proper recruitment procedures are implemented so that the centre is staffed by the best caliber of candidates.
The Super Surgeries are one of the few success stories of New Labour, however they have been bitterly fought against by existing GP's which culminated in a misinformation propaganda campaign during 2008 as Super Surgeries as originally envisaged were to drain failing surgeries of their patients over to the new super surgeries.
However the original Labour plans of competition in front line GP health care services that would seek to drive out of business the poor performing practices has been subverted by the programme of handing over new premises to existing staff, therefore failing to maximise returns in terms of improvement in patient healthcare provision.
June 2008
In an attempt to halt the governments programme for the implementation of Polyclinics or ‘Super Surgeries', the political arm of GP's the British Medical Association (BMA) delivered a petition of more than 1 million signatures to Downing Street against the implementation of 150 ‘Super Surgeries' and for existing GP Surgeries to be protected.
The Health Minister, Ben Bradshaw lashed out at the scare tactics accusing the BMA of "misleading and mendacious" behaviour in getting patients to sign up to the petition.
I am not surprised the BMA has collected so many signatures, given the misleading and mendacious nature of its campaign.
"If I were to run a campaign making false claims that something terrible was about to happen, a lot of people would sign my petition too.
"We have received widespread anecdotal evidence of patients feeling pressurised to sign the petition as well as practices telling their patients blatant inaccuracies about local plans." he said.
The New Con-Lib government has announced their intentions to cut wasteful public spending accrued under Labours 13 year reign, with already announced initial cuts of £6.2 billion soon to be added to by at least another £24 billion of cuts aimed firmly at hitting the many quango's first, therefore it is not inconceivable that the new yet to be built Darnall Medical centre may end up being scrapped if a new government audit of the LIFT development scheme concludes that it has proven to be a poor value for many, especially as it has apparently failed to introduce real competition into front line GP services.
Sheffield NHS UK GP Patient Survey Surgery Rankings 2009-10
The highly credible Department of Health funded UK GP Patient Survey has continued to give patients a voice as to the actual quality of healthcare services they are in receipt of at their local surgeries across England.
The most recent data release covers 9 months from 1st April 2009 to 31st December 2009 which involved more than 4.1 million questionnaires being sent out to patients across England covering more than 10 question areas such as being able to book an appointment, or Waiting time at the surgery or concerning the practice opening hours and most important the overall patient satisfaction at the quality of healthcare provided (www.gp-patient.co.uk).
For the city of Sheffield, in total 48,324 questionnaires were sent out to the patients of Sheffield's 91 GP surgeries of which 20,626 were returned, from which detailed results were compiled as listed below for the Overall Satisfaction category for all 91 GP surgeries in order of ranking from best to worst.
Sheffield's Top 5 GP Surgeries
| Level of Satisfaction | |
| MILL ROAD SURGERY | 99% |
| STANNINGTON MEDICAL CENTRE | 98% |
| RUSTLINGS ROAD MEDICAL CENTRE | 98% |
| DOVERCOURT SURGERY | 98% |
| THE HEALTH CARE SURGERY | 98% |
Sheffield's best ranked surgeries all tended to cluster closely together, and tend to reside in the more affluent wards of the city which is reflective of the 'post code lottery' where those that reside in the affluent wards due to more likely being professionals are able to demand a better quality of NHS GP services than those that tend to reside in the deprived wards tend to suffer in silent as to what passes for health care provision which plays a significant part in contributing to a more than 14 YEAR GAP IN LIFE EXPECTANCY between peoples living just a few miles distance from one another, which has been commented upon by the Sheffield MP and Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg :
"It is an outrage that social mobility has slowed, not increased, under the Blair-Brown years. It is an outrage that in Sheffield, where I’m an MP, life expectancy in the poorest wards is a full 14 years below the life expectancy of those living in the wealthiest wards. Your life chances are now set by the circumstances of your birth as never before."
Sheffield's Bottom 5 GP Surgeries
| HAROLD STREET MEDICAL CENTRE | 80% |
| STONECROFT MEDICAL CENTRE | 79% |
| HIGHGATE SURGERY | 75% |
| DARNALL HEALTH CENTRE (MEHROTRA) | 70% |
| DARNALL COMMUNITY HEALTH | 70% |
Unlike the best ranking surgeries clustering closely together, the bottom ranking surgeries see a sharp drop off in the patient experience at the quality of health care from 85% to an abysmally poor ranking of just 70% of patient satisfaction for Darnall, something that the patients of Darnall have had to suffer with for many, many years, with no apparent effort by the Sheffield Primary Care Trust to get to the root cause of why Darnall's GP Surgeries (merged) consistently fail to perform to the satisfaction of a large number of its patients when other GP surgeries achieve 98% satisfaction ratings.
Results For All 91 Sheffield GP Surgeries Ranked in Order of Patient Overall Satisfaction of Care Received
Sources
- UK GP Patient Survey - http://results.gp-patient.co.uk/report/main.aspx
- Sheffield NHS PCT
Source: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article20120.html
By Nadeem Walayat
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