Public Meetings



This area will contain notes taken at the public meetings held as part of the consultation process. Note that details of any meetings held as part of the scrutiny process will be posted under the Scrutiny area. Please contribute your recollections and comments if you attend any of these meetings.

Consultation Meetings

Several public meetings will be held as part of the consultation; some will be held in Ealing Town Hall, and others may take place at the Nuffield Unit in Ealing.

As of April 6th 2006, it is known that meetings will be held as follows:

  • April 11th at Ealing Town Hall, New Broadway, Ealing W5 2BY. Time 3pm to 5pm

  • May 16th, at Ealing Town Hall, New Broadway, Ealing W5 2BY. Time 6pm to 8pm

  • June 21st in Committee Room 3 at Ealing Town Hall, New Broadway, Ealing, London W5 2BY. Time 7.30pm
    (This meeting was only announced June 12 th.)

NOTE: These meetings have not been well publicised! Please notify anyone who may be interested in attending as soon as possible.

Additional Meetings

In addition to the public consultation meetings, a meeting for primarily, though not exclusively, for parents of children who are currently attending the unit is planned for

  • June 19th at the RNTNEH restaurant, RNTNEH 330 Gray's Inn Rd, London, WC1X 8DA from. Time 7pm to 8pm

Report on the First Public Consultation Meeting (April 11th)

This meeting was held as scheduled in a room which was hard to find and which required a security guard escort to access. Due to very poor and late publicity and regarding the time and location of the meeting, only one parent (Tony Canas) was able to attend. Parents of children currently attending the Nuffield Unit were not informed of the meeting via the Unit before they broke up for the Easter holidays.

A full set of notes describing what took place has been prepared by Tony Canas and may be inspected here.

These notes do not form the official minutes of the meeting, and have not been approved as accurate by any representative of the Royal Free Hampstead NHS trust. Please take some time to read these notes as they contain some significant points, some of which might be explored in the next meeting.

Minutes were also kept by Bernadette Pritchard, Nursing Manager of the Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital. Copies are being requested and will be posted when / if available.

A complaint is being lodged with the Ealing Scrutiny Panel over the conduct of the consultation process so far. A copy of the letter appears in the Scrutiny section of this web site. Please have a look at the complaint: if you are in agreement, please send a letter or an e-mail to Mr Nigel Spalding at Ealing local authority.

Report on the Second Public Consultation Meeting (May 16th)

In constrast to the first meeting, this meeting was well attended (no doubt as a result of the efforts of parents to publicise it). In addition to various representatives of the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust (including the chief executive Andrew Way), attendies included parents of present, past, and hopefully future pupils of the unit, adult ex-pupils, friends and relatives of parents of present and past pupils, Ealing councillors, a member of the Ealing PCT Patient's Forum, the chief executive of AFASIC (charity for children and young adults with speech and language difficulties), John Bercow MP, the local press, and other interested members of the public.

Mr Way was heavily criticised for the conduct of the consultation to date. For further details of the meeting, refer to the notes prepared by parents. (Please feed back to us any comments you would like to make about these notes.)

As a result of the heavy criticism and apparently new information that came to light, Mr Way is now asking his Trust Board to approve the continuation of the unit for a further year to allow more work to be done on future service models based on the feedback from the consultation For further details, please refer to Andrew Way's letter to John Bercow, and his Chief Executive's Report to the Board (May 2006).

This proposal will be put to the board May 25th and a decision is expected then.

Although this is clearly a very welcome development, many parents believe that it does not go far enough, and that in view of major new proposals and information not in the consultation document and the difficulties with the consultation process so far, the consultation should not simply be extended, but halted, and if necessary restarted. For more detailed arguments on this point, please refer to the complaint letter sent to the Ealing Scrutiny Panel.