Longer trips to Accident and Emergency costs lives Shocker!

In a study reported on in Today's Grauniad, an unbelievable report says that longer trips to Accident and Emergency costs lives.

Government has denied this, and has also refuted claims that the Pope (Benedict XVI, a suspiciously Catholic name) is a Catholic as well as insisting that bears do not defecate in woodland.

What is bizarre is that this statement of the bl**ding obvious requires some sort of study. The study was in fact paid for by the Department of health and shows a direct correlation between distance to an A&E department and mortality rates, though to be fair I suspect the issue is more related to time to treatment.

The thing is that Labour are trying to convince everyone that centralising services is a good idea. Red Dawn Primarolo has been on the airwaves spewing propaganda that both the medical profession and patients want this. This is disingenuous in the extreme. It is true that some consultants favour it, and it is also true that there is a case for some types of treatments to be carried out at specialist centers such as cancer care, major heart surgery and so on, but crucially not emergency care in the case of either heart or stroke care (you need to stabilise a patient quickly). There is considerably less of a case for the centralisation of maternity units as it can be very hard to get maternity places in Sussex as it is. Clearly in this area there is a distinct lack of capacity and traveling long distance whilst in labour is problematic in any case.

In fact most GP's and patient groups are up in arms about service closures, with mass demonstrations for keeping services at many hospitals including the Princess Royal in Haywards Heath whilst of course Labour ministers have been out in protest as well.

The BBC has this.