Our consultation results

We thought people might be interested in the outcome of the consultation meeting and the questionnaires which were distributed to the citizens' panel.
Firstly the meeting was very well attended,given that it was a dark January night straight after Christmas, over 40 people of the eighty invited attended and so the only problem was trying to ensure that everyone had the chance to air their views.
The majority of the people present were from patient groups with around a quarter from the citizens' panel so a thank you to everyone who came out on the night.
It would be fair to say there was a lot of concern over the future of the hospital with many reflections on how important it was to access hospital services locally and the difficulties involved in travel to hospitals further afield.

There were also many positive comments about the service at Shotley Bridge and a reminder from one member of staff that even without beds Maternity was still seeing over a thousand mums per year for their postnatal and antenatal care!
Notes were taken of everyone's comments and they have already been forwarded to the consultants carrying out the work to give them a good indication of what was important to the local community.


We also had some 225 questionnaires returned which again was encouraging given that we had only been able to send them out the week before Christmas.

From those returned 94% confirmed they would use Shotley Bridge Hospital if the choice of hospital was given to them: Even those who did not see Shotley Bridge as their first choice were still very supportive of the hospital's continuing role.
On the second question :
By far the most positive response was in favour of developing the out of hours service and minor injuries into an urgent care service . While developing a diagnostic centre gained the second largest vote.