Secret Oxfordshire NHS meetings branded 'dangerous and backwards'

Oxfordshire's Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee (HOSC) – the group which is supposed to hold health bosses to account on the public's behalf – has decided to hold twice-monthly meetings with them behind closed doors.

The committee took the decision after a government-ordered review into the closure of Witney’s Deer Park Medical Centre suggested it should have done more.

In response, the group which normally meets four times a year has now formed the HOSC Planning Group, which will meet twice monthly with Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group - the body which commissions health services.

They will discuss health plans, including what is to happen next in Witney, and only what are deemed to be ‘substantial’ changes to services will be referred up to the public HOSC meetings for full scrutiny.

The aim is to ensure HOSC is more regularly updated so significant changes to healthcare are not discussed too late in the process.

But critics have said the move is a backward step and called for more transparency.

Witney county councillor Laura Price, who sits on HOSC, supported improvements to the way it operates but objected to the lack of transparency at the new meetings.

She said that one thing she complained about with Deer Park was that she and other panel members only found out about the closure late in the process.

Ms Price said: “I don’t mind having less formal meetings, and HOSC is quarterly so if we had had those in place before we would have heard about Deer Park a lot sooner.

“But it’s really dangerous when you start saying you can’t have things in public: if we’re going to be effective we have to have the confidence to do it in public.”

She also said she did not want to see the new planning group used as a funnel through which everything has to pass before being discussed by HOSC.

Ms Price and other Labour councillors called for the meetings to be held in public but they were voted down by the rest of the committee.

Speaking at the meeting last Thursday, one member of the public urged members of the committee to reject the motion.

She said: “Don’t throw away our only real voice to question and to scrutinise change through this disruptive protocol and behind closed doors non-democratic committee.”

However HOSC chairman Arash Fatemian argued the planning group would allow developments to be discussed more informally and at shorter notice, while claiming no decisions on changes to health services would be made. He also said the decision on what constituted ‘substantial’ change would be left down to the HOSC members.

Ultimately, the motion was passed by a majority of eight to three, with Ms Price and two others voting against.

The move was in response to a government-ordered review into the closure of Deer Park Medical Centre in Witney.

At the end of 2016, the CCG announced that Deer Park Medical Centre would close because nobody could be found to run it after Virgin Care’s contract expired.

Campaigners launched a passionate fight to save the centre, holding demonstrations and at one point applying for a judicial review against the CCG in the High Court, which ended unsuccessfully.

The announcement was referred to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt last February following a unanimous vote by HOSC, which deemed the decision a 'substantial change'. Mr Hunt then referred it to the Independent Reconfiguration Panel.

In its report last summer, the IRP said the referral was not suitable for a full review, but it had strong words for the CCG, saying the organisation had been complacent and failed to do enough to engage with patients.

When the practice closed last March it had around 4,000 registered patients.

Speaking about the HOSC decision, Brenda Churchill, Witney's deputy mayor and former head of Deer Park's patient participation group, said: “I’m not very happy to be perfectly honest. It’s a backward step.

“They’re going back to how things were before and it’s wrong – very wrong.”