The Integrated Care Board (ICB), having offered to facilitate discussions in 2023 for a community takeover, appears to have abandoned the idea in favour of a sale and withdrawal of NHS services.
Instead of discussing this openly with the Seaton Hospital Steering Committee, the ICB (aka “One Devon”) has been floating other ideas but only so far with the League of Friends.
Looks to Owl as if NHS Property Services have an agenda and are hell bent on ignoring any community input at variance with it. Is the Devon ICB attempting to pick off opposition groups one by one?
This is a clear example of a lack of transparency and openness in public service.
Whose health service is it?
Seaton Hospital Steering Committee – press release
The Seaton community is alarmed by reported new threats to both the continued existence of the Hospital and the NHS services currently offered in it.
The Seaton Hospital Steering Committee, which represents all parties and communities in the wider Seaton area, has written to Steve Moore, the Chief Executive of the Devon Integrated Care Board, as follows.
Dear Mr Moore,
We are writing on behalf of the Seaton Hospital Steering Committee, a cross-party and cross-community body, including our MP, which was elected at a public meeting of 400 people in November 2023, after your proposal to hand back a wing of Seaton Hospital to NHS Property Services became known. The Dr Bob Jones Wing (named after the man who led the campaign to build the Hospital) had been built in 1991 entirely with public donations, after the community provided half of the funding for the original building in the 1980s, when the Exeter Health Authority agreed to run the hospital and provide NHS services in it.
Over 10,000 people signed petitions against the 2023 proposal, which were handed to your chair outside County Hall, and our campaign repeatedly topped regional television news bulletins. Local feeling was exceptionally strong because of the unfairness of the previous (2017) decision to remove the Hospital’s beds, taken despite the Clinical Commissioning Group’s original view that Seaton was the best place to retain them. There was a widespread view that this decision reflected political pressure rather than a rational geographical distribution of resources.
In 2023, recognising the strength of local feeling, your board offered to facilitate discussions about a community takeover of the wing, for which we worked up a proposal that was handed to NHSPS and yourselves in June 2024. 16 months later, we have not received a formal response to this plan. Instead, this summer you approached representatives of the Seaton & District Hospital League of Friends, a constituent body within our committee, to float the ideas of a sale of the Hospital as a whole and a complete withdrawal of NHS services.
As you may imagine, we are extremely concerned about the potentially damaging effects of these ideas, which negate all the work that the community and the League have done to support the Hospital, practically and financially, over the last 37 years as well as to get it established in the first place. News of the discussions has caused considerable alarm in the local community. We find it shocking that, 8 years after the beds were removed, while Devon NHS has stabilised the use of all the other community hospitals which lost them, Seaton Hospital may now be singled out to lose its services.
The original rationale for the creation of the hospital has only been strengthened by changes in the local community over recent decades:
- Seaton’s population has almost doubled since the Hospital was built.
- With 43 per cent over the age of 65 (2021 census), and a rapidly growing population over 85, Seaton has the most elderly population profile of any town in Devon except Budleigh Salterton.
- The prevalence of dementia in the patients of the Seaton and Colyton Medical Practice is consistently the highest in Devon – currently 379 per cent of the national average.
- It takes longer to travel to the RD&E from Seaton than from any other town with a community hospital.
- One in six households (many of them single, widowed older people) lacks a car, and there is no direct bus service to the RD&E.
We do not accept, therefore, that NHS services can simply be removed from Seaton to other local community hospitals. We request that you put in writing any proposals that you have for the Hospital. We also ask that you meet our committee as soon as possible, to assure us of the continuation of the Hospital as an NHS facility and the continued provision of NHS services in it.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
Jack Rowland, Chair
Martin Shaw, Secretary
Seaton Hospital Steering Committee
East Devon Watch 
The integrated Care Board is behaving in a shameful manner, now trying to divide communities apart, similar to when they were closing down hospital beds when they did their best to pitch towns against each other.
Why do Seaton and the surrounding towns and villages have to lose out again?
Seaton and Axminster and their local villages are the furthest away already from any hospital, There is no public transport from the villages to Exeter hospitals, nor even to Ottery St Mary; Honiton or Sidmouth. People are already concerned when getting appointments for any of those hospitals as there are great difficulties involved in getting to them, particularly for families and older people without their own transport, or for people who are living on their own and all vulnerable people who are very anxious regarding this difficulty in accessing hospital treatment.
It is damaging to their physical and mental health.There is something very wrong here, it discriminates against the people of Seaton and its surrounding villages.
As all communities need their hospital so does Seaton : Seaton people paid for their hospital themselves, they have loved it, cherished it ,and supported it, But it was stolen from them.
Seaton and its local community deserve better than the current treatment they are receiving from ICB . Our people deserve better.
LikeLike