We should be glad that Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust is to create a new community hospital for Oxford on a ward of the John Radcliffe Hospital.
At least the city is to retain some sort of community hospital facility.
One cannot help feeling, however, that it is a rather grudging provision on the part of the PCT.
The provision of 20 beds on Level Five of the John Radcliffe Hospital does not measure well even against the provision in Oxfordshire’s smaller market towns where, as we have reported many times, people remain nervous about the future of their own community hospital facilities.
We are not getting a community hospital but community hospital beds.
A hospital would have its own identity and, as some camapigners have pointed out, would be set in its own grounds. Usually, these settings are much more conducive to the sort of recovery programmes that elderly patients in community hospitals are following.
The fact that the PCT has chosen to station its community hospital facilities within the structure of the JR does make us wonder how long it is proposing to continue to provide them. Is it an interim solution, a short-term fix, or will a 20-bed community hospital be a permanent fixture in the JR?
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