The Horton Hospital’s campaign committee has given a damning response to a paper on future options for maternity services in Banbury.
The group has told Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (OCCG) it is not willing to help reach conclusions because information offered is flawed.
In a letter, vice chair of Keep the Horton General (KTHG), Charlotte Bird, told OCCG chief, Lou Paten: “We are unable to score something that features so many errors, anomalies and ambiguities.”
The paper included results of a £70,000 survey of women who have given birth since the Horton consultant-led maternity was ‘temporarily’ closed in 2016.
KTHG had been invited to ‘score’ twelve options for the future of obstetric (specialist) maternity services at the Horton as part of a review of the downgrade.
Ms Bird said councillors asked to make a decision on what maternity service should be pursued for the Horton need clear information .
She described it as a ‘huge omission’ that South Warwickshire did not appear to be represented in survey results. “
Ms Bird said KTHG feared a number of mothers may not have been invited to take part in the survey.
She said the survey missed a vital opportunity to gauge how the JR is coping with increased numbers.
“There is absolutely no point issuing findings without giving a full description of how the JR is coping with the massively increased number of mothers birthing there.”
She said the fact that an Oxford mother reports in the survey giving birth in a wheelchair while waiting for a bed indicated the JR was not coping.
A section of the paper detailing doctor rotas was ‘beyond the ability of most people to make any sense of whatsoever’ without a key. An option for a Horton consultant-led unit to be ‘managed by another Trust’ was given no explanation.
KTHG also criticised a graphic using ‘positive descriptors’ – mothers were asked to describe their birth experiences in three words.
“It is impossible to construe why ‘care’ should be one of the words used most frequently without knowing the context.
“The implication is that the care was positive. However the contributors were asked to submit three words so they may have said ‘absolutely no care, care was appalling, care, what care? care totally lacking’ – we simply don’t know. It is an unreliable piece of evidence.”
KTHG said some percentages used in the survey did not total 100. There were conflicting statistics about births taking place en route to hospital with one graph saying there were none but elsewhere in the document that three respondents reported giving birth in transit.
Because responses were calculated with the rest of Oxfordshire’s, Banburyshire views and the impact on local families were lost.
KTHG described as ‘absurd’ a weighting system that reduced figures that showed 93 per cent of respondents from South Northants and 75 per cent from Cherwell preferring to give birth at a Horton obstetric unit to minus-40 per cent.
A spokesman for OCCG said it would be responding fully to KTHG’s comments in due course but it was unable to provide a statement to the Banbury Guardian in the timeframe available because of the detailed nature of the points raised.
This article originally appeared on Banbury Guardian
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