Patient’s plea: Listen to staff about Future Hospital

Friday 24 August 2018

A patient with a life-threatening condition is pushing for hospital staff have a major say in where the new £466m Future Hospital should get built in a vote.

Long-term SOS Jersey researcher and campaigner Dave Cabeldu (pictured), who has done extensive work to help protect the island’s coastlines, said that he wants to “give something back” to the people that helped save his life.

“Being in hospital in and out over 18 moths and then a total of 5 weeks in, 3 major surgeries and being extremely unwell, one meets staff all across the building,” he told Express.

Those included surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses and radiologists – many of whom would frequently bring up the controversial plans to build a new hospital on its current site in conversation without prompting.

Pictured: Mr Cabeldu said that he wants to "give something back" to the staff that helped him by launching a petition to allow them a say on the site of the Future Hospital.

“I didn’t have to ask many questions, as the staff often discussed it.  I didn’t hear anyone think the current hospital plans were good - quite the reverse.”

Many were said to have been “puzzled” why the current site had been chosen to be built on, while some newer staff told him they simply weren’t aware that other options had been available.

Mr Cabeldu expressed fears that some staff felt gagged from expressing their true opinions, noting that some had shown a “worrying reluctance” to put their own opinions to the Future Hospital Team, with some consultants apparently telling him that they had been “’encouraged’ to support the official line.”

He said that he had explored the possibility of building in the Waterfront area back in 2013 in his capacity as SOSJ coordinator. “We were told that the land is too valuable for the hospital to be built. I would say, what could be more valuable than a hospital? It’s public land.”

Pictured: If Mr Cabeldu's petition gets 1,000 signatures, the Health Minister, Deputy Richard Renouf, will have to respond.

While that might be his view, Mr Cabeldu most keen for the final say to lie with the staff that will populate the new building, helping patients, like himself, through illnesses and conditions.

He has therefore launched a petititon to ballot the island’s “highly-valued hospital staff” on the future use of the current site.  

In an open letter attached to it, he writes: “I worry that these excellent clinicians will not wish to rock the boat by expressing their professional opinions. I also worry that staff may not wish to continue to come to work here if the hospital is adjacent to a building site with all that entails.

“However, we now have a new Government and the chance to get it right. I suggest that we should be building the most environmentally friendly solution, not cramming in only as much as we can fit; on a noisy site, adjacent to heavy, air polluting traffic.

“I sincerely believe that, having presented the staff with the clear options as should have originally been done, the preferred option of their majority should be the one chosen.”

In just a few days, the petition is already nearly halfway to securing an official response from the Health Minister, Deputy Richard Renouf. If it gets 5,000 signatures, States members will have to debate the idea.

“The bottom line is this:  Do the general public want their new hospital site to be one the hospital staff have had no say in? All the petition is asking is for a simple question to be put to the staff, ‘Do you want this to be built on this site? Yes or no?’, before going further," Mr Cabeldu commented.

The subject of the hospital's site is already on the political agenda. Last month, the Chief Minister, Senator John Le Fondré, set up a committee of inquiry into what they described as "one of the most important decisions in a generation."