Unclear policies

Sadness that someone who purports to represent a major political force in North West Hampshire can be so ill-informed.

Concern that, for the same reason, Mr Emmerson should chose to deliberately confuse readers about the roles and responsibilities of our local public bodies.

Test Valley Borough Council has no responsibility for the licensing of A-boards.

This is the sole domain of Hampshire County Council.

Similarly, TVBC has no direct healthcare commissioning role and therefore no influence over the location of the proposed new acute care hospital. Quite rightly, that decision has been left to healthcare professionals.

Indeed, Mr Emmerson’s seeming confusion over the role he’d like to see Andover War Memorial Hospital play is equally worrying. His call for ‘critical care’ capacity appears deliberately ambiguous.

‘Critical care’ normally refers purely to intensive care provision.

Instead, I suspect Mr Emmerson means full acute provision.

This would include emergency department, medical admissions and full medical inpatient care. In order to create an acute care service that is safe and meets the expectations of patients 24 hours per day requires the development of integrated healthcare systems, massive investment and in the case of Andover would require the duplication of healthcare resources already provided elsewhere in our area.

TVBC fought hard to encourage North Hampshire’s healthcare commissioners to site the proposed new acute hospital in our district. Sadly we were unsuccessful, however its proposed new site is significantly easier to access for North West Hampshire residents than the existing sites in Winchester and Basingstoke.

Mr Emmerson’s energies would be better spent joining all of us at TVBC in pressing for the timely construction of this new facility rather than trying to score cheap political points by advocating unclear, misinformed and naively populist policies.

Cllr Ian Carr, leader Test Valley Borough Council