Hospital campaigners start their legal battle

Save the DGH march along Eastbourne seafront Saturday 15th September 2012 E38169N Liz Walke speaks at the rally on the Wish Tower slopes.

Published on 05/02/2013 16:50

Save the DGH campaigners have started legal proceedings against the decision to move services to The Conquest in Hastings.

Back in December, the health overview and scrutiny committee (HOSC) agreed controversial plans to focus emergency orthopaedic surgery and emergency general surgery at the Conquest in Hastings – a move which would see an average of 15 patients a day forced to travel between the two sites.

Save the DGH campaigners, including Eastbourne MP Stephen Lloyd, are challenging the decision and after a meeting with Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt earlier this year, they are now pushing for a judicial review. The campaigners sent a letter to the local healthcare trust on Friday (February 1) stating their intention for a judicial review.

Liz Walke, Save the DGH campaigner, said, “ We believe these services are vital to both hospitals and cannot be divided between the sites. One hospital two sites does not work when dealing with emergency services and also paramedics, although very skilled in emergencies, are not doctors. Also one must not forget the patients family, friends and carers who are vital in communication and recovery. It is for these reasons and more that we need to make a legal challenge.”

A spokesperson from the East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust said, “We can confirm we have received a letter from solicitors acting on behalf of Liz Walke.

“We will be taking legal advice and will respond in an appropriate fashion within the timescales required.

“The proposals to improve the quality of care in three specialist areas have been through the due process including a public consultation. A decision on the future delivery of these services was made by NHS Sussex several weeks ago and this decision was considered to be in the best interests of local people. by HOSC.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Hospital campaigners start their legal battle

Top stories

News