2:00am Saturday 6th September 2008
Former Echo editor Jim Worsdale looks at health care proposals.
WAKE up, fellow Shoeburyites! Speak up! Even rise up in support of – or against – the latest major plan for our town by Authority.
Do you want your neighbourhood medical surgeries replaced with one big, all-embracing, multi-million central primary care complex in the Garrison grounds?
Do you care your local pharmacist might close down, replaced by a chemist’s facility in the new centre?
Do you care what next is on the cards for your neck of the woods? Or couldn’t you care less?
There’s a glossy document available from South East Essex Primary Care Trust setting out all the wonderful – or worrying – options for the future of health services in our overcrowded, once largely ignored and forgotten Shoebury.
You, the people, have until October to have your say.
You won’t get one of these brochures, though – not unless you pick up a copy from a surgery or a chemist. They’re not being mailed or delivered to homes in this “public consultation”.
For me, lifelong Southender, longtime Shoeburyite, there are questions. And worries. Do we want yet more building in the former military grounds that have been bespoiled by recent and continuing building development?
Might the arrival of some “super centre” mean the slow and inevitable death to the several individual, neighbourhood doctors’ practices dotted around our extensive, heavily and increasingly populated part of Southend?
Will it force everyone to drive or catch a bus to the proposed new centre, which would be part of a public-private partnership scheme (and maybe part of the creeping privatisation of health care)?
What would become of Campfield Road Shoebury Health Centre? Back in the early Nineties, the Echo revealed, amid much criticism, anger and condemnation from authority, that the then health supremos planned to close the place.
Public denials and accusations against this writer, personally, were followed by admissions that, yes, it had been on the cards, but would not now happen.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands have been spent on updating, modernising and improving the centre. There’s been talk of extensions and a second floor being added.
Next door, a former police sub-station was bought from Southend Council at a long-ago auction. It was extended and expensively improved and modernised as a popular, privately-run pharmacy. Will this be condemned to death? Will the chemist in Shoebury High Street also be threatened?
I think we should be told. I think the people of Shoebury should ask loudly – by responding to the public consultation document – if they can get hold of a copy. They should attend the public meetings at Shoebury House in Ness Road on Thursday, September 11, at 2pm, or at Shoebury High School, on Monday, September 22, at 7pm.
The Primary Care Trust might by then be able to let us, the people of Shoebury, know the truth, or otherwise, of local belief that Shoebury Health Centre, in Campfield Road, stands on part of around two acres sold to Southend Council for £700 way back in 1936 “for the benefit of the people”.
It is understood a library, bowls green and tennis courts were originally mooted for such benefit.
By 1950, a covenant had been lifted so an infant welfare clinic could rise on the site. It never happened. By 1969, a further covenant allowed the building of the present health centre.
So what becomes of the building and the site if a new, all-inclusive care centre is built across the road, on the Garrison land and nudging up to the already decimated, reshaped Gunners Park?
Wake up! Speak up! Ask. Demand to know everything about what may be planned for the future! Then make up your minds, on the fullest of information and knowledge.
Do not whinge, whine and wonder what might have been when it is too late.
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