It’s now possible to write email to your local/county/government representative as well as individuals who are at a senior level in the Dept of Health, NHS England/Improvement plus the local clinical commissioning group and the West Herts Hospital Trust.
Who should I write to ?
The correct person to write to depends on what point you are trying to put across. If you want to go to the top – clearly the prime minister is the person to go to.
BUT as some people have found out, an email written to the prime minister gets passed to the Dept of Health, who ask a minion to send a stock reply like this
Our ref: PMDE-12XXXXX
Dear Ms B,
Thank you for your correspondence of 1 July to the Prime Minister about healthcare in Bovingdon. I have been asked to reply and I apologise for the delay in doing so.
In line with the Government’s commitment to devolve power to communities, decisions about health and care services are essentially a local matter, and it would not be appropriate for ministers or Department of Health and Social Care officials to intervene.
Decisions about the funding and provision of health services are the responsibility of local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs). You may therefore wish to raise your concerns with Herts Valleys CCG. The contact details are can be found at:
https://hertsvalleysccg.nhs.uk/contact-us
I hope this reply is helpful.
Yours sincerely,
Joseph Rawlinson
Ministerial Correspondence and Public Enquiries
Department of Health and Social Care
Clearly if you have been following this issue, the CCG are MEANT to be commissioning the work form the trust, but in reality, the trust lead and the CCG rubber stamp their work without really doing a proper job.
If your point is about getting value for money out of public funds and you would like to make a point about how excluding a new site from a shortlist, that would be best directed to the Dept of Health and the Treasury.
If you’re talking about how difficult it is to get the local NHS to listen to ANYTHING, try NHS Improvement or NHS England and NHS Improvement as well as the CCG.
If that fails then the Dept of Health is the place to go.
If you’d like to make a point about the community interest being neglected, and an awful design of a hospital being made in the middle of a town where there was no access, try the planning department at the local council. If you want to go higher up, try the ministry of housing & community and talk to Homes England who help public bodies sell off plots of land to generate money and invest in building new homes with the land freed up. Or the planning inspectorate if a council planning department is going wrong.
If you want to know what the people you voted for in local elections are doing, then get in touch with them. They are there to represent you after all. They may be a member of a district or county council committee that specifically looks at health, or may refer you to one of their colleagues.
Finally there is your local MP. Generally you have to write to the MP in the area you live otherwise they won’t be able to or interested in helping. Find your local MP here or signup to get updates and we’ll email you their details.
Do’s and Dont’s
PLEASE follow these guidelines if you are writing in
- Be polite. These people are trying to do a job
- Be clear and get to the point
- Don’t ramble
- Put a specific question/s that can be answered
- State that you want an answer from that person not to be referred to another government department
- Just because it’s email and it’s easy do NOT copy loads of other people on the same email as there is chance your email will be flagged as spam and the person you are sending it to won’t actually get it.
- If you don’t get a reply within say 20 days (the normal period of time SOME people work to) then re-send the email or phone to check if it was received.
- Please mention that you support HertsvalleysHospital.co.uk in your email. Every little helps !
What if you don’t get a reply ?
If you don’t get an answer then you can submit a freedom of information request to the organisation responsible. There is a really useful website called whatdotheyknow where you can read other peoples letters and the responses received. Most government information SHOULD be available but sometimes officials deliberately delay replying particularly if your question is not clear.
If you get a reply and think we’d be interested in it, please forward it to info@hertsvalleyshospital.co.uk
If you want a list of email addresses for these people, let us know and we’ll email it to you ASAP.