A&E and the covered-up criticisms

APPROACHING two years ago, the College of Emergency Medicine took a look at how Guernsey's Accident and Emergency department operates – and it wasn't impressed.

GP skills there varied and there was no standard in place, A&E response was also variable and lacked protocol or best practice-driven care and much of what happened appeared to be driven by how doctors were paid.

A year after that, as part of the FTP process, consultants Capita looked at A&E and concluded that change was needed to improve patient safety, deliver best practice and save up to £750,000 a year.

Fast forward to this year and requests by this newspaper to have copies of the reports proved fruitless. Copies have now, however, been sent to all deputies.

Then this week, the Health minister threatened all States members with Data Protection legislation and their own code of conduct if the highly critical reports dealing with public finances and patient care were leaked.

To the cynical, that might look like trying to cover up embarrassing news rather than addressing the very real concerns raised by an eminent college and some respected consultants.

It is, however, a depressingly familiar response from a government that claims it is committed to transparency and openness.

It also comes after the tribunal into the airport firefighter dispute recommended adopting a presumption that reports commissioned from the public purse be made publicly available unless there were specific grounds for doing otherwise.

In this case, there is no reason for the reports to be withheld. Yes, it raises serious questions about the role of the GPs in A&E care, their involvement in a contract that, according to Capita, damages taxpayers and also poses the question of how Health and Social Services could have entered into it in the first place.

But that is no reason to suppress two documents written at taxpayer expense that reveal issues of extreme public interest.

In his email to States members, the Health minister said there was nothing in the report that specifically stated that patients lives are at risk.

The weasel word, however, is 'specifically'. The whole thrust of the report is that care is not as good as it should or could be.

And that's why another report has been withheld from islanders.