Questions Dr Trounce should answer

 “We heard of no serious clinical incidence that has occurred as a result of the changes.” This is what Dr John Trounce, a Consultant Paediatrician in Brighton who chaired the Review Team that looked into the removal of consultant-led maternity services from Withybush to Carmarthen a year ago, told the Hywel Dda Health Board meeting in Llanelli last week.

This emphatic reassurance added to the claim made in the report itself: “We found services in general to be safe with improving outcomes and better compliance with professional standards.”

Yet the report largely discounts the 830 responses the Review Team received from members of the public. Which is extraordinary given that Sue Eardly, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s Head of Reviews, described the number as “a massive response”.

So at the meeting of the Hywel Dda Health Board in Llanelli’s Prince Phillip Hospital on Thursday last week, I asked the Board’s chair Bernadine Rees whether, as a member of the public, I could be allowed to ask Dr Trounce a question. Reluctantly she allowed me one.

“Are you expecting us to believe that out of the 830 responses you received not one, not even one, led you to question whether there have been any safety issues with the removal of consultant led maternity care and the Special Care Bay Unit from Withybush Hospital to Glangwili in Carmarthen?” I asked. 

I observed a look of consternation bordering on panic pass across Dr Trounce’s face as I put this question. He claimed that all the responses were taken fully into account before stalling and referring to Sue Eardley who was sitting alongside him.

The concerns articulated in the responses were “colourful” and “felt emotionally” was the way she put it. Then she added: “In terms of outcomes there were three incidents that were serious.”

It is clear that the Review Team largely dismissed the public responses they received directly in response to their call for evidence. Their report sidelines the worries about safety they heard as merely being “fear of the unknown”. Instead they prefer to rely on data collected by the Hywel Dda Health Board itself. “The picture of actual patient experience gathered by the Health Board is significantly more positive that that expressed by campaigners in the social and mainstream media or at public meetings,” says the Review report.

That is hardly surprising. After all the Health Board could not be expected to highlight criticisms of itself. But not only that the report attacks the public who have been responding. It refers to “negative messages from the well organised public lobby” which, it says, have been inadequately countered by the Health Board. The result, it claims, is that many staff were left “feeling unsupported and anxious”.

If Bernadine Rees had allowed me some more questions I would have asked Dr Trounce whether he personally had analysed all the 830 public responses he received? Did he think of speaking to any of those people whose experience suggested safety issues had arisen? We need answers to these questions. Meanwhile anyone who thinks the submission they made to the Review Team ought to receive wider circulation should send it to the Pembrokeshire Herald.