HEALTH bosses have admitted they must come down from their ‘ivory tower’ and work with patients to shape future services in Oxfordshire.

This week Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) revealed new plans for extensive public engagement as a plan to change services is taken back to the drawing board.

At an Oxfordshire Healthwatch board meeting, chief executive Louise Patten told members organisation must now start again ‘with the very basics’ using ‘different methods of engagement’.

Addressing members of the public, Oxfordshire CCG’s clinical chair Dr Kiren Collison added: “We don’t want to do it in our ivory tower - we want to get you on board and do it with you.”

However, campaigners have reacted to the announcement with scepticism, claiming they had 'heard it all before’ and saying details are needed.

The first phase of the Oxfordshire Transformation Plan (OTP), which the CCG say was carried out to address urgent safety issues, caused public outcry when health chiefs made the decision to close 100 hospital beds and permanently down-grade maternity services at Banbury’s Horton General Hospital last year.

The second phase has since been scrapped following a Government-ordered review which criticised the CCG’s handling of the phase one public consultation surrounding the maternity servcies at the Horton.

As a result health bosses announced that the hospital's A&E department and paediatric services, that were due to be reviewed, were no longer under threat while the decision to downgrade the obstetrics unit would be brought back under review.

The first phase of the OTP was two years in the making costing more than £143,000.

Chairman of campaign group Keep the Horton General, Keith Strangwood, said the CCG’s new plans risked wasting more time and money by repeating steps from the first phase of the transformation plan.

He said: “We’ve heard it before. There are 10,000 responses from the Banbury area telling the CCG what is needed.

“We’ve made it very, very clear that we want a full obstetrics unit at the Horton. You just need to revisit those 10,000 responses, but they’ve already said they aren’t going to do that.

“It sounds like madness – they are repeating what they’ve done in phase one. It just stinks like a paper exercise.”

This scepticism was shared by campaigners who fought to save the Deer Park Medical Centre in Witney, which closed in 2016 after the CCG could not find a provider to run the facility.

Campaigner, Linda Strut said: “You can’t believe them, we have heard it so many times before, there’s been so many meetings where they’ve said, ‘we’re listening’ but they don’t.

“They just seem to be cutting services left right and centre and people’s lives are being affected.

“We do appreciate the doctors and nurses but the people above just seem to be wasting so much money.

“Witney needs another practice badly.

“We tell them what’s needed but whether they take notice of it that’s another matter.”

Speaking at the meeting on Monday, Healthwatch Oxfordshire board chairman professor George Smith said the CCG must ensure any future engagement and subsequent changes are done effectively with Oxfordshire languishing near the bottom of the league tables for a ‘very, very long time’.

Addressing Ms Patten, he said: “People have lost confidence because they have not been listened to in the previous consultations.

“The reality is after two years nothing has changed, nothing has happened of value to the community so we have to say now we are just at the starting gate.”

According to the CCG the new approach will involve ‘gradual change and testing of new service models locally’, while the public will be involved at the ‘earliest opportunity’.

Factors such as rurality and local community assets would be taken into account, with better collaboration between health and social care services.

A spokesperson for the CCG said it was now working with Oxfordshire Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee in planning for public engagement on obstetrics at the Horton and its approach to further transformation.

The matter will be discussed at the Oxfordshire Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting this morning.