How a party leader changes his mind when in power

OPPOSITION leader and Chipping Norton MP David Cameron has given his thoughts on key Horton services being saved. (Banbury Guardian, March 2008) "Services should be delivered according to what people want rather than some top down intervention from Government and I hope this signals the end of the top down reconfiguration that has caused so much misery in the health service."

"I think it's excellent news," he said.

"I think it is one of those occasions when common sense has won through, I always believed that the attempt to downgrade the Horton was wrong.

"I think that the doctors and nurses and GPs and all the local people who stood up against it and said this is bad for patients, bad for the local area, they won through and I think it's great.

"The real problem was that they were having to downgrade the maternity unit and downgrade the services because of the way we now train doctors and because of the limits on working time and the whole feeling was that this was wrong.

"You should design your services to meet the needs of patients, not to meet the needs of training so quite rightly they have been told to go back and think again and that is good news because the Government has said the days are numbered for the district general hospital. I don't agree at all, I think the district general hospital is a model.

"People want to have a hospital in their area like the Horton where they can have their children, they can go when they are sick and they can get cared for.

"To me the biggest worry was losing the consultant-led maternity unit because you were going to see people having to go much further to have their babies born and it would have taken the heart out of the hospital.

"The people had the right argument because we want local services. You should not not shut the maternity units just because it is complicated to train and all the rest of it. You should have services around the needs of people and I think that is really important.

"It was not just people power (which saved the Horton), the people had the right argument and I think we had it clearly and won the day.

"I think other people will be able to look at the arguments made in Banbury and think 'hang on, we can keep these units open'."

On the Government, he said: "No other organisation on earth would say 'oh look, it's difficult to provide training so we will shut these stores in these towns.' If it doesn't work in the commercial sector it shouldn't work for the NHS.

"We need to make sure that we don't have a new threat put in place just as the old one has been removed but I think this is pretty conclusive. I haven't been able to read everything about it (in the IRP report] but if you read the press release you will really find that the things that were going to happen to the Horton are not going to happen."

On the impact for the ORH Trust, which wanted to cut the services, he said: "I think they will have to think again. They said 'look, this is being done because of the way we now train doctors and because of restrictions on working hours' and I think they will have to look at a way of training doctors that means they maybe will have to move a little bit between the Horton and the JR in Oxford.

"But I think if that means keeping a much-loved and much-needed service open in Banbury, I think that is a better outcome frankly.

"It's only under this government we have had this mania for re-organistaion and this mania for saying you are only a good maternity unit if if you have 4000 live births and it is the mania for re-organisation and reconfiguration that we have got to stop.

"Services should be delivered according to what people want rather than some top down intervention from Government and I hope this signals the end of the top down reconfiguration that has caused so much misery in the health service."