Despair over dialysis funding

Marie White has to travel to Plymouth for kidney dialysis

Five years of fundraising to pay for a kidney dialysis unit at a Devon community hospital have ended in frustration and despair.

Campaigners in Holsworthy reached their £90,000 target only to be told their efforts were in vain because the local health authority cannot afford the unit's running costs, estimated at £40,000 a year.

The decision has dismayed a small group of kidney patients who have to travel more than 40 miles over difficult country roads to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth up to three days a week for treatment.

Disappointment

Marie White is one of the disappointed kidney patients who had pinned their hopes on the new centre at Holsworthy Hospital.

The health trust moved the goal posts at the last moment

Richard Brown, mayor of Holsworthy

Mrs White currently has to travel from her home in Bude to Plymouth and back for her life-saving treatment, which means a nine-hour day.

She makes the journey on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and spends most of the other days of the week recovering.

Her husband Reg said the unit in Holsworthy would have transformed their lives.

"We were all bitterly disappointed and slightly outraged by the cavalier and crass way it was handled by the health trust that moved the goalposts at the last moment," said Richard Brown, the town's mayor.

Misplaced commitment

Holsworthy Hospital's League of Friends started the fund-raising believing they had a commitment from the then local health authority to go ahead with the project if they could raise the money.

But a change in the management structure of health service delivery led to the creation of the North Devon Primary Care Trust.

Its director of public health, Dr Mike Owen, wrote to the campaigners to tell them that it was no longer able to support the project.

Dr Owen wrote: "Regrettably this has fallen to the wayside against some very tight financial circumstances where if you are putting £40,000 into a service where people are already getting treatment, then you may be forgoing services where people aren't getting treatment."

The local Liberal Democrat MP, John Burnett, accepted that the new health authority had inherited a huge budget deficit from its predecessor.

But he described the decision as a slap in the face for the community of Holsworthy.

However he said the primary care trust had undertaken to review the decision in two years.