Plea for investment in Banbury childbirth is taken to county bosses

Keep the Horton General deputy chair Charlotte Bird addressed the Oxfordshire Joint Health and Scrutiny Committee at its meeting last Thursday at the first of two debates concentrating on the future of the Horton General Hospital.

Ms Bird referred to a surprise announcement last week by Oxford West & Abingdon MP, Layla Moran, that she would campaign for a new £120m wing for the John Radcliffe Hospital to ease pressures that have resulted in widespread childbirth trauma for mothers.

Ms Bird questioned the extreme restrictions on space on the JR’s Headington site and said the obvious solution was to reinstate full maternity services in Banbury. The JR troubles began as the Horton’s obstetric unit was downgraded to a midwife-only service in 2016.

“The OUH is already having serious issues recruiting to a unit delivering far more babies than any European obstetric (consultant-led) unit would. The pressures of work are too great. This would double the problem,” she said.

"Oxfordshire is the only county of its size (760,000) which only has one obstetric unit. Putting a bigger unit in Oxford does not cure the problem. It needs to be in Banbury where, within 14 years, there is going to be a catchment of 405,000. That is nearly half of what the whole of the JR’s catchment population will be.”

Ms Bird said the JR maternity department was designed to deliver 5,000 babies per year. Sticking to this would allow the unit to cope, she said.

“Banbury needs its obstetric unit returned and the cost will be far less than £120m,” she said.

In answer to questions about maternity services in the light of an expected review by the Thames Valley Integrated Care Board (ICB), OUH chief medical officer Prof Andrew Brent said it was about ‘understanding the population… and projections of population growth’.

“It’s not just total population growth. It's about families and projections of childbirth in catchment areas over the coming decades and combining that with a detailed understanding of the overall resource available that the commissioners have to manage across all the health services.

"(They will have to look at) what the potential models are and understand how that resource might and should be deployed. We will await the outcome of that report because ultimately we will have to rely on our commissioners to make a decision as to what services they're going to commission.

"We wouldn’t want to make any decision on anything less than as good an assessment as possible, which is what they're setting out to do. We will we will work with the ICB as one of the stakeholders to contribute to that review in any way that we're able to.”

In 2017 following downgrade of the Horton’s maternity unit, a commitment was made by the then-Clinical Commissioning Group to review the population figures and maternity needs for Banburyshire every two years. Keep the Horton General has rejected any suggestion that a maternity review should be across the Thames Valley region but should be, as promised, focused on the Horton and the region it serves.