Save King George Hospital Campaign
The proposals by the local Health Authority to downgrade King George Hospital and close its Accident & Emergency facility are once again being challenged by local residents, local groups and local Councillors and MPs.
On Wednesday 18th there was a public meeting organised by Lee Scott MP at which over 100 people were in attendance. It would have been more but for the Area Committee 3 meeting on the same evening. On a show of hands Cllr Mrs Sladden got a 100% vote that the proposals are unacceptable. She has also written to all the GPs in the borough and they are 86% against the proposals. Which rather upstages the claim by the Health Authority that they are in favour as reported in the Recorder. We are grateful to our member Bill Howe who took minutes of the meeting, see here.
CORRECTION from Cllr Mrs Sladden: "It was 86% of the doctors I wrote to replied and 95% of these were not in favour of A & E closure and polyclinics and 5 % who were in favour of closure and polyclinics were GP 's that had been appointed as Directors of Polysystems."
On Thursday 19th our councillors debated the situation at Full Council. There’s nothing like an external threat to unite political parties in their resolve to fight these proposals. See report in WW Guardian here.
On Saturday 21st there was a protest outside King George Hospital organised by Wilson [megaphone] Chowdhry [far right]. It made it to the BBC News site.
On the Council Leaders blog there is a comment, reproduced in full below [these things have a habit of disappearing off that site].
Anyone even considering the downgrading or closure of King George Hospital and the removal of accident and emergency services in Redbridge is courting disaster on a major scale. Queens Hospital will not be able to cope – they can’t even cope now. Why don’t NHS London & Redbridge understand that there are far too many residents in Ilford alone and the removal of any medical services from the borough will put people’s lives at risk? We have noticed (reading the Ilford Recorder over the past 12 months) that every time an accident is reported upon, the ambulance crew have taken everyone to Queens even if the accident occurred in Ilford. Why?? Because someone in the Trust wants to manipulate statistics to suit their own end game, so any reports will show that A&E at King George’s isn’t being used but A&E at Queens is brimming over.
We are supposed to live in a Democracy (although the way Labour and Gordon Brown behave, we are fast becoming a country under dictatorship) the people of Redbridge have already campaigned and demonstrated against the closure of King George’s and/or reduction of A&E services. What doesn’t the Trust understand? How many times do we have to do this before they get the message? It is no different from the fiasco that was the Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The People vote No, but then they are made to vote again until the politicians get the answer they want. What a complete joke. If only Queens remains, then I hope the decision-makers have to use the “facilities” themselves – but I suspect they either live in a different borough, or use private healthcare. Should services at King George’s be reduced/removed in spite of all the opposition past & present, whoever is responsible for this will ultimately have our blood on their hands. I just hope they will be able to live with that on their consciences.
Of course if Redbridge council had used the government grant obtained to “improve” its website for something useful, like an e-petition facility we could all sign that. But since we haven’t got that you could leave your view in the comments below and/or drop an email to your MP and ward councillors to say you support their position. Links to contact details in the side bar.


















