Closure of Grantham Hospital Accident & Emergency Department

The disappointing news that the Accident and Emergency department at Grantham Hospital will close at night will have come as a shock to all residents of South Lincolnshire.

The United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULHT) have announced that from 17^th August, the A&E department will close at 6:30pm and reopen at 9am. The Trust have said the decision is due to severe staffing shortages affecting all three of the Trust's hospitals: Grantham, Lincoln and Pilgrims in Boston.

This decision will be a worry to both our members and the wider population who will lose a vital NHS service at night, with the nearest A&E departments being 25 miles away from the town with some patients potentially being sent to Nottingham or Lincoln for emergency treatment.

However, what is worse about the plight of A&E services at Grantham Hospital is that this situation could have been entirely preventable. The NHS has been facing a recruitment crisis for several years, with national headlines warning the public that there were not enough recruits to fill vacancies in our urgent care wards. The reduction of A&E services at Grantham shows the end result of a problem which the government has been acutely aware.

But why are our hospitals so difficult to staff? With industrial relations between the government and the doctors' union, the British Medical Association, at their worst for a decade it is unsurprising so many of our aspiring young medics feel apprehension. Indeed, with the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt threatening to impose contracts in a 'put up and shut up' attitude it can be easy to see why morale in the NHS is low at present.

Since 2015, Mr Hunt's attitude has resulted in strikes and low morale within the Health Service. The recruitment crisis has intensified and now our local Health Trust is spending money employing locums and agency staff, unnecessarily wasting thousands of pounds instead of investing in more permanent staff for our local hospitals.

Indeed, with costly locums and agency staff acting as a drain on NHS budgets, it is unsurprising the situation in Grantham has occurred. What is urgently needed is more doctors to reverse this temporary measure and get Grantham fully open for patients. The recruitment crisis is not local to just Lincolnshire and it is time for the Government to act to plug the gaps in healthcare provision and make sure that the NHS is accessible for all; whether you live in a rural area like South Lincolnshire or a major city like Nottingham.

When the Liberal Democrats were in Government we prevented the Tories imposing the most damaging cuts and managed to secure increases in funding for areas such as mental health. At the 2015 election we put forward costed proposals to meet the additional £8 billion a year that NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens identified as being necessary to enable the NHS to cope with the challenges.

With the crisis at Grantham Hospital, it is now more crucial than ever to campaign for the maintenance of our local A&E and hold the Government to account for its appalling handling of the recruitment crisis in our National Health Service.