The population of Welwyn and Hatfield deserve far better from their elected representatives than to use their local healthcare provision as a political football, but this appears to be the case in relation to the Queen Elizabeth II General Hospital.
The Green Party on the contrary believes in the absolute necessity for such services and not in their destruction, promoting the extension of the available facilities and not their reduction.
It’s bad enough to have its healthcare services continually denuded without the consideration of it being replaced by a building merely a quarter the size fitting into the present hospital car park.
The New QEII services will be so meagre that it will barely resemble Hertford County which is simply a collection of walk in clinics.
The claim is still being made that the present QEII General Hospital is to be replaced like with like by a recognisable Hospital with fully functioning Accident and Emergency Department, and that it will be replete with Intermediate Care Beds .These assertions beggar belief. Is the populace assumed to be so credulous that we will take any amount of guff?
To continually stack blame for reality at the door of the Primary Care Trust is misleading especially as this body is soon too made defunct to be replaced by an as yet unspecified entity. Public accountability will be going from minimal to non-existent as the PCT is swapped with a G.P. Consortium/Private Conglomerate involving private concerns like Virgin/United Health.
Welwyn and Hatfield Green Party consider the local people as currently ill-served by those they should be able to trust with their genuine concerns and feel that elected officials should properly represent their elector’s interests and not those of private financiers.
 

By Barry Cross, Welwyn & Hatfield Green Party