Dulwich Hospital

The next Dulwich Community Council 14 December at Christ Church on southern end of Barry Road will be discussing the Dulwich Hospital after the latest update from Southwark Primary Care Trust. Trust has been lacking for the last 10 years with some many changes of plans and the appearance of secrecy and quango knows best. This has been compounded recently by the lifts being closed and the consequent ‘temporary’ closure of the intermediate care wards. These wards provided local care for people not well enough to go home but not poorly enough to block a bed at Kings Hospital.

However, I’m hopefully that with the current scaffolding, planning applications for new pedestrian entrances that the PCT now plans to keep the remaining hospital buildings and all the services they’ve traditionally provided. Sell the vacant land and the profits used to renovate the remaining hospital. That the financial accountancy tricks of the LIFT Co. Private Finance Initiative will be ended for Dulwich Hospital and we can all move on with local facilities agreed with the local community. This doesn’t mean the PCT using the rigged local ‘consultation’ results.

What do you think should happen to the Dulwich Hospital?

Passive drinking

The World Health Organisation has produced a draft global strategy on problems caused by alcohol.

It was a roundabout way for me to read the UK government’s chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, chapter of his 2008 annual report covering “passive drinking”, the damage that heavy drinkers wreak on others. To illustrate the extent of the problem in the UK, he reported that in 2008, there were 125,000 “alcohol-related instances of domestic violence”, that an estimated 6000 babies are born annually with fetal alcohol syndrome and that in 2006, 7000 people were injured and 560 killed as a result of drink-driving, not including the drivers.

The term passive drinking is new to me. But blimey that 125,000 would equate to around 30 instances of domestic violence every year in East Dulwich ward alone.

“Teenage smokers face badly wire brains”

Fascinating reading a report that prenatal and adolescent exposure to tobacco smoke have been found to be associated with changes in brain pathways to relay ear signals.  Most pronounced with teenage smokers.

Other research reports teenage exposure to smoking resulted in reduced auditory and visual attention with boys being most affected. Quite possible that such teenager’s hear and understand less.

No research yet to establish whether the affects are reversible.

I’d always understand it was bad for your health. But it now appears quite convincing that smoking is bad for your brain development.

Mayor Boris closes HGV cycle unit

London Mayor Boris Johnson has announced the closure the Commercial Vehicle Education Unit. This group of 3 Police sergeants and 9 Police constables specialise finding defective lorries and taking them off the road and working with haulage companies to reduce collisions with pedestrians and cyclists.

Not enough was being done to reduce such collisions. HGV lorries are the number one killer for cyclists in London. Even less will be done going forward.

The announcement was almost exactly nine years to the day when a previous treasurer of Southwark Cyclists, while I was the chairperson, Brigitte Robinson, was killed by a left turning lorry whose driver had a young child in the cab and had been working 12+ hour shifts 7 days a week for many months.

Loosing a close cycling friend was incredibly distressing. How many more people have to die to HGV’s before the few exempt from sideguards are no longer exempt and the limited resources are withdrawn from educating lorry drivers and cyclists.

Air pollution – rubbish

London has the worst air quality of any UK city and one of the worst in Europe.

It’s so bad that its causes OVER 3,000 premature deaths each year and so we breach European laws. It costs a fortune in all the ill health this causes such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, etc.

Road transport is a major contributor causing 41% of NOx and 67% of PM10’s. London already has a Low Emission Zone which only applies to HGV’s, buses and coaches to Euro III emission standards. From 1 October it was meant to be extended to cover large vans and mini-buses but Tory Mayor Boris Johnson decided to postpone this and subject it to more public consultation. A duplicate repeat. I guess those 3,000 people don’t have names so easy to politically ignore them and delay anti air pollution.

What the Lib Dems at the GLA have proposed is to introduce a more stringent inner London Low Emission Zone focusing on  the 1 million Londoners living and working where the air pollution is worse. That this should happen before the Olympics arrive and the world is told how rubbish our air quality is. That would be humiliating for Londoners.

NICE alcohol

Talking to East Dulwich Police the majority of Violence Against the Person – people hitting other people and worse – is behind closed doors and usually alcohol related…. 

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recommended as part of its latest advisory document on public health that each alcohol unit should have a minimum price.

NICE says “Making alcohol less affordable appears to be the most effective way of reducing alcohol-related harm. There is sufficient evidence (within the published literature and from the economic analysis) to justify the introduction of a minimum price per unit. The evidence suggests that young people who drink and people who drink harmful amounts of alcohol tend to choose cheaper drinks. Establishing a minimum price per unit would limit the ability of these groups to ‘trade down’ to cheaper products. A minimum price per unit (unlike a tax increase) would prevent retailers from passing on any increase to producers, or absorbing it themselves, so it would prevent them from selling alcohol below cost price.”

This contrasts nicely with a survey of 10,000 teenagers by Prof Mark Bells from Liverpool John Mores University showing that alcohol is so cheap kids can get plastered on pocket money – 17p an alcohol unit or £1.36 for a 2 litre bottle of very strong cider.

Contradicting this is ASDA supermarket executive Paul Kelly & Sainsbury’s Nick Grant to a Commons Health Select Committee.

It will be interesting to see if the supermarket chiefs win over peer reviewed scientific research.

Will NICE be nobbled by the Department of Health. Sadly my money is on those supermarket drinks promotions selling at ridiculous prices winning at an ever greater cost to society of drunken behaviour.

Bojangles

Several weeks ago we suddenly heard the terrible news a registered private day nursery called Bojangles  close to the junction of Barry Road with Upland Road was threatened with closure.

It has run up signficant debt with Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue. It was advised by accountants to go into liquidation. Bojangles changed its legal entity to Fingerprints (Dulwich) Ltd. Unfortunately that meant the lease with the church expired. So the church served a notice to quit on them. Overall this meant its Ofsted status ended and had to be reapplied.

Lots of worried parents contacted us. We quickly escalated this to Cllr Lisa Rajan who heads up Childrens Services. Quickly Southwark Council Early Years officers stepped in to try resolving the dispute between the church and Bojangles/Fingerprints without success. All parents were contacted and public meeting took place to help find other nursery places. Currently 95% of deposits have been returned to parents with remaining £6,000 to be returned. More importantly these young children have been offered places.

LESSONS LEARNT:

This is the fourth nursery in Southwark to take such actions to avoid HMRC tax debts. Officers are planning to proactively give advice to all such nurseries to reduce the risk of this happening again.

Sustainable Community Act – speed cameras

For some time I’ve been following this Act from its initial proposal onwards. It aims to give communities the opportunity to take back powers for things pointlessly decided by central government or its quango’s.

As part of this Act I applied to Southwark that its asks for Southwark to have its own Safer Camera Partnership – speed and red light running cameras. Effectively opt out of the London wide scheme. Full council agreed to approve this and it is now with the next filter organised by the Local Government Association. If they agreed it, then it is formally lodged with central government. They then decide whether to implement this change or not.

My idea relates to the fact that for several years no new cameras have been installed in Southwark by the London Camera Partnership.

The idea came from attending a Southwark Living Streets presentation where they showed that virtually all collisions on our roads occur on major roads and that the primary cause is speeding. They also explained that lots of research that such fast roads, such as the Old Kent Road, result in deprivation via ill health, injuries, noise, social dislocation (not knowing your neighbours).

Hopefully, I’ll get to present my case to the LGA soon.

What do you think – more cameras?