A New Whipps Cross Hospital? – Yes!
Fewer Beds & No Palliative Care Unit? – No!

Updated by Eva Turner on behalf of A4W 13/04/2025

Dear friends and supporters,

Even though the redevelopment of Whipps Cross has been pushed back to 2032 at the earliest, we have to continue to fight for the current and future hospital services we all depend on

. So below is an update on what we've been doing:

1. At the end of March we sent a submission to the Commission on Palliative and End of Life Care about the importance of the Margaret Centre to our communities. Thank you to everyone who gave us your stories. Our submission can be read HERE. without the appended stories.

We outlined the history of the Margaret Centre and its importance. We wrote that there is no other palliative care establishment/hospice in Waltham Forest and Redbridge ( over 500,000 inhabitants in total in 2021) and that Waltham Forest has no Hospice at Home service, and no 24/7 emergency palliative care for dying patients at home. We wrote about how the very specialist services provided by the Margaret Centre are hugely valued by local people, and called for its future to be secured at the new hospital site.

2. Some of us contributed comments to a piece in "The Londoner" in February about Whipps, in particular the A&E. It's a long, well written piece about the huge pressures on the A&E, and the poor state of the hospital. It gives the context - the underfunding of the NHS, and cuts to beds - in particular. The article can be read HERE.

3. We're working on lobbying our MPs to get funding for backlog maintenance and improvements to the A&E so that it's safe for patients and staff.
We all need to make sure that we don't lose services at Whipps in the meantime, so please let us know if you hear about services being run down or cut.

Whipps Cross rebuild put on hold
- - - Latest update: Adrian Stannard explains how Barts Trust has prevaricated too long over the redevelopment of Whipps Cross Hospital and will need to start again to lodge the necessary detailed plannng application. - - - See the page shared on the main Forest Radio site - - -