Each year the Council formally recognises a member of the Epsom and Ewell community who goes above and beyond in a voluntary and/or campaigning capacity. The Active Citizen award is within the incumbent Mayor’s gift. The individuals are permanently recorded on a special citation within the Town Hall and receives a medal at the evening reception honouring volunteers from across the borough.

Photo: Anne and Clive Richardson (left) with the Mayor and Mayoress of Epsom and Ewell

So it is with great pleasure we congratulate Epsom Rotarians Anne and Clive Richardson being awarded the Epsom & Ewell Borough Council Active Citizens Award by the Mayor of Epsom & Ewell Cllr Clive Woodbridge. The award was made during the evening of 10 March 2023 at the Mayor’s Civic reception. Anne and Clive  have given much of their time to help with many local charities through Epsom Rotary Club and are active within the Epsom & Ewell Twinning Association.

Photograph Competition Open to Scouting and Guiding Groups

Each year Epsom Rotary hold a club photography Competition open to Scouting and Guiding Groups. This year the theme is the built environment and entries are welcome by the end of March 2023.  For details of how to enter, visit the website :

https://www.rotary-ribi.org/clubs/page.php?PgID=892508&ClubID=874

Monday 13th March at 7pm at Wallace Fields Junior School Dorling Drive, Ewell, Epsom KT17 3BH, Epsom and Ewell Times will chair a public meeting on the Draft Local Plan. The meeting will feature a panel of experts. Tim Murphy CPRE, Margaret Hollings Epsom Civic Society and Chair Licensing Planning and Policy Committee Cllr Steven McCormick (Council officers invited). Questions and view points from the public attending will be allowed. We will confirm if the meeting can be followed online in the next few days.

Registration to attend is not required but it would be helpful to us if you did inform us of your intention to attend. This will help some planning. Also it would help the chair of the meeting if you submitted questions in advance.

You can tell us if you are attending the Epsom and Ewell Times Local Plan Public Meeting and suggest a question by filling in:

_{Local Plan meeting attendance and question form.}

Related reports:

Epsom and Ewell Local Plan meeting times

Mole Valley Local Plan paused: official

Epsom & Ewell Borough Council Draft Local Plan.

Green-belters seeing red on Local Plan?

Hook Road Arena plans and links to many other related reports.

On International Women’s Day Surrey University announce a prize winner among its female academics.

Online technologies to help neurodivergent people successfully enter the workforce are being developed at the University of Surrey, led by Dr Alison Callwood, in a project that has seen her win one of Innovate UK’s ‘Women in Innovation’ awards. 

 The Generating Neurodiverse Inclusion Selection (GENIUS) project will explore what communication methods and personalisation options could be used to optimise access and performance in online interviews and assessments for those with neurodiverse conditions such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia.  

Dr Alison Callwood, GENUIS project lead and Senior Lecturer in Integrated Care at the University of Surrey, said:  

“Approximately 15 to 20 per cent of the UK population is neurodivergent. The unfairness they experience in the recruitment field is unjustified. Tackling this issue will not only improve the working lives of neurodivergent people by unlocking the valuable contribution they can make, but it will also boost the economy by helping address the rising number of unfilled positions in the workforce. 

“I am delighted to receive this award which includes a £50,000 grant. The support it offers is invaluable to this project.” 

This project will build on previous work by Dr Callwood who has developed the successful interview tool SAMMI which reduces bias and provides robust, reliable, and cost-efficient interviews and assessments for employers.  

Helping to further the project, the funding awarded to Dr Callwood will give her access to tailored business coaching, mentoring and a wide range of networking and training opportunities designed to help grow this innovative project.  

Professor Paul Townsend, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, said:  

 “Congratulations to Alison on winning this award. Being one of only 50 recipients of this prize, shows the strength of her project and her hard work and dedication in this field. Her skills and the diversity of her career are valued greatly here at Surrey, and I am proud to have her in our team.” 

 Indro Mukerjee, CEO, Innovate UK, the United Kingdom’s innovation agency,  

“We are proud to support this group of trailblazing women who are changing the world through the power of their ideas. Their innovations underpin solutions inspired by societal and environment challenges, as well as their own lived experiences. I hope their stories will encourage and inspire others to follow their lead.” 

The government’s hospitals programme has been called the “HS2 of hospitals” as “quite intense” discussions continue about how to take it forward.

Epsom and St Helier had its plan for a new site agreed by the NHS in 2020, with an original date for opening set at 2025, now pushed back to 2027 “at the earliest”. A health liaison panel at Epsom and Ewell Borough Council heard from James Blythe, managing director at the trust, who said adapting the current buildings to modern healthcare standards was becoming “increasingly difficult year on year”.

The national programme was announced as delivering 40 hospitals by 2030, with Epsom and St Helier one of eight “pathfinder” hospitals due to be at the top of the list, Mr Blythe told the meeting. But he said there were “quite intense discussions” going on at government level about the programme and how to take it forward.
Mr Blythe said: “What the government, the Treasury and the Department [of Health], are working through is basically how do you go about building 40 hospitals? Clearly what don’t you do is say to 40 schemes: ‘Go and design something completely different, go out to the construction market and try and procure it.’

“This has sort of now become the HS2 of hospitals. Let’s think about how we do this as a single scheme. Let’s think about how we do this consistently, how we procure consistently, how we design consistently.”

With St Helier hospital “very evidently crumbling” and problems with buildings at the Epsom site too, the trust plans to build a new specialist emergency care hospital on the old Sutton Hospital site, next to the Royal Marsden Hospital. Mr Blythe said: “We know that if we build a modern hospital to modern standards, we can do better for our patients, including local Epsom residents.”

But he said with the move from one financial year into the next, there were questions about where future works might sit in relation to other capital projects. He added: “Clearly what the construction market can’t take is 40 new hospital schemes trying to do the same thing at the same time.”

The meeting also heard that the trust was expecting feedback on its plans “very soon”, hoping it would then be able to get on with the planning process. Mr Blythe said: “As you can imagine, planning for a hospital which is going on to the land adjacent to Royal Marsden in Belmont in a mature and developed residential area, that planning process will not be insignificant. So we know that that will take some time”

Epsom and Ewell Borough Councillor Liz Frost (Residents’  Association, Woodcote Ward) asked about plans for the new multi-storey car park due to be built at the Epsom site, which was granted planning permission on appeal in December. She said she received a lot of complaints about roads surrounding the hospital being clogged up as people queued for spaces.

Cllr Frost said: “I have in the past spent quite a lot of time at Epsom Hospital when car parking has been horrendous and everybody was turning up late for clinics because they couldn’t actually get in.”

Mr Blythe said work should start in the autumn to build the new car park, and that options being looked at to minimise disruption during the nine-month build included possible park and ride schemes and using town centre car parks.

Saying he would bring back a plan later in the year for how the project would be handled, Mr Blythe also said the “flip side” was parking should be “substantially better once it’s built”.

He added: “We’re hoping that by [building the new car park] we will prevent some of the build-up of traffic from backing up into the town centre, which has sadly been a feature of the hospital for the last few years.”

Related reports:

Pay black hole takes £2.2M Epsom Hospital funds

Epsom Hospital multi-storey car park rises

Epsom Hospital’s multi storey carpark wrong on many levels?

Epsom Hospital car park appeal

Local hospital’s building woes

Epsom based Surrey Stands With Ukraine’s charity director returned from Ukraine recently. Interviewed yesterday by Epsom and Ewell Times (E&ET).

E&ET: Why did you go?
Lionel Blackman: The fantastic Epsom and Ewell team of volunteers of Surrey Stands With Ukraine has raised over £380,000 from the generous public and sent over £1 million worth of donated supplies to Ukraine over this first year of the War. A charity should know those who distribute aid on its behalf and after one year it was time to meet some of our Ukraine partners in person.

Photo is of a destroyed house in the Ukrainian village of Moschun just north of Kyiv.

E&ET: Who did you meet?
LB: We have supported a variety of groups relieving the civilian victims of the war. I met a team of English women who help refugees at the Polish border railway station of Przemsyl. Groups based in Kyiv who send our supplies to Ukrainians who continue to live near the front-line, who evacuate elderly and children from such areas and who are helping rebuild communities whose homes have been destroyed.

E&ET: Was your visit worthwhile?
LB: In Ukraine I just spent one and a half nights in hotels, half a night in an air raid shelter and one night on a train. It was deliberately a short visit so not to distract our partners from their vital volunteer work and their ordinary paid employment. But still, getting to know them better and being fully satisfied as to their commitment to honest and selfless voluntary charitable service is important for our own charity, our wonderful volunteers and our donors. We can continue with ever more confidence that we are doing the right thing and spending the funds appropriately.

E&ET: What did you see of the war?
LB: There were drone attacks on Kyiv the night I stayed hence half of it spent underground. Hosts told me that the air raid sirens sound every other night. Is Putin trying to wear you all down? I asked. “Never, he will never do that”. This is the thing. Putin is uniting a nation he thought he could divide.

I visited Moschun. The defenders of this village held the line and stopped the Russian army getting to nearby Kyiv last year. Most of the homes are destroyed. The Negotiator’s Annual Estate Agents Awards organised by our charity’s trustee and Epsom resident Grant Leonard, raised funds for 20 generators that we sent to Moschun with the assistance of local Epsom, district, national and Kyiv Rotary.

E&ET: When will the war end?
LB: A charity can’t get involved in the politics but personally I am of the opinion that Putin needs to be defeated militarily and the people of Russia have to turn against this war before it will end.

It is the UK Government’s role to aid foreign military. A charity can only support civilians whose lives should not be attacked in any war. In this war civilians are being killed and maimed and made homeless in their thousands.

Surrey Stands With Ukraine and the great public of Epsom and Ewell and beyond have to help the civilian victims for the long haul and keep giving.

Just imagine that once beautiful house in the photo was in Epsom?

On Monday 13th March at 7pm at Wallace Fields Junior School Dorling Drive, Ewell, Epsom KT17 3BH, Epsom and Ewell Times will chair a public meeting on the Draft Local Plan. The meeting will feature a panel of experts. Tim Murphy CPRE, Margaret Hollings Epsom Civic Society and Chair Licensing Planning and Policy Committee Cllr Steven McCormick (Council officers invited). Questions and view points from the public attending will be allowed. We will confirm if the meeting can be followed online in the next few days.

Registration to attend is not required but it would be helpful to us if you did inform us of your intention to attend. This will help some planning. Also it would help the chair of the meeting if you submitted questions in advance.

The Epsom and Ewell Borough Council is holding an extraordinary meeting on 22nd March at 7.30pm at The Town Hall, The Parade, Epsom to discuss a motion about the Draft Local Plan. Only 11 councillors approved the Draft Local Plan going forward at a meeting of the Licensing Planning and Policy Committee of 30th January. The Full Council meeting of the 22nd March will be the first public opportunity for all Councillors to speak on the Local Plan.

You can tell us if you are attending the Epsom and Ewell Times Local Plan Public Meeting and suggest a question by filling in:

_{Local Plan meeting attendance and question form.}

Related reports:

Epsom and Ewell Local Plan meeting times

Mole Valley Local Plan paused: official

Epsom & Ewell Borough Council Draft Local Plan.

Green-belters seeing red on Local Plan?

Hook Road Arena plans and links to many other related reports.

The Epsom and St Helier Trust board heard the complaint of a patient allergic to nuts given nut oil. LDRS reports:

A hospital patient with a peanut allergy and an epipen was given medication for a nosebleed which contained nut oil. The patient at St Helier hospital was told before going home that the A&E doctor “didn’t think” the cream contained nut oil, a hospital trust board meeting heard. But on returning home and reading the leaflet, the unnamed patient learned there was in fact arachis oil, or peanut oil, in the medication. The patient had gone to the emergency department after a nosebleed, having started on a medication to help reduce blood clots. The patient had told the nursing team on arrival at the hospital and the doctor who prescribed the cream for the nosebleed about their allergy.

On contacting the emergency department, the patient was told there was not an alternative medicine that could be prescribed.

Members of the Epsom and St Helier Trust board heard at a meeting on Friday (March 3) that the patient then contacted their GP for an alternative before making a complaint to the trust so the issue would not affect other patients.

The board meeting, held at Epsom hospital, heard from a registrar and a consultant in the emergency department what steps had since been taken to learn lessons from the incident. These included a safety alert being sent within the team and the individual doctor being spoken to, while board members also asked what more could be done at trust level to help in what was a “very, very busy” department.

Ruth Charlton, the site chief medical officer, said the emergency department was of the only in the trust to use a paper prescription method rather than electronic. She also said that because the emergency department was operating 24/7, and doing things very quickly, patients were not sent to pharmacy for medications, which would be “an extra checking mechanism in place”. She said an electronic system would flag allergens, such as cows’ milk, in a medication and then allow something else to be prescribed instead.

She added: “We need to take away this case and look at what more we could do to address the systems issues.”
The meeting also heard it was not clear what checks were made by the doctor about what was in the medication, or who the patient had spoken to when calling the hospital to ask about alternative medications.

Board chair, Gillian Norton, said the board was impressed with the “rigorous approach to learning” shown by the department and thanked the doctors for sharing the experience. She said: “Keep up the great work. “We are very conscious that you have done all this learning and thought about this while you have got this incredibly busy day job.”

Royal Surrey hospital trust bosses are beginning to plan for three days of junior doctor strikes which could have a “significant impact” on services. A national ballot is currently taking place of members of the BMA Junior Doctors union, which closes on February 20.

If members vote for action, it could mean a possible 72-hour strike taking place in March, a board meeting heard on Thursday (January 26). As yet the trust, which runs Guildford’s Royal Surrey County Hospital as well as the Haslemere hospital, has not been directly impacted by its staff striking, though ambulance strikes in December saw the hospital put measures in place.

Meeting documents said the junior doctors’ strike was more likely than others to meet the 50 per cent threshold needed for members to strike because a national ballot was being held. According to the BMA website, junior doctors have seen their pay cut by more than 25% to their salaries since 2008/09.

Bill Jewsbury, the trust’s medical director, said the three-day strike, which he thought “probably would” go ahead, would have a “significant impact” on various parts of running the trust. The meeting heard that other, more senior doctors, would need to “step down” into the roles, along with non-union members.

Dr Jewsbury added: “That then has an impact beyond that 72 hours because we then have to rest those people.
“What you’re looking at is a much longer period of disruption than just your three days’ of strike.”

According to the documents, a review carried out of the day of ambulance workers’ striking in December had identified one incident that was being investigated of the strike having an impact on patient care. The meeting also heard that the possible junior doctors’ strike would impact on its target to clear the backlog of people waiting more than 78 weeks, a year and a half, for treatment by the end of March, in line with national guidance.

Getting rid of all the people on the waiting list was described in documents as “the biggest operational challenge affecting the trust”, with a peak of 207 patients in the category at the beginning of October, falling to 161 at the end of November and to 155 in the first week in December.

Matt Jarratt, chief operating officer, told the meeting: “That is going to be a major challenge was going forward.”

A woman said she felt like her mum was “a prisoner” when she couldn’t take her home from a Surrey hospital.
The daughter, who we are choosing not to name, said it felt like the family was caught in a “never-concluding circle” when trying to communicate between NHS trusts to get her mum discharged.

Her mum was in hospital for five months, having been admitted to Guildford’s Royal Surrey County Hospital with pain following breast cancer, but the family living in West Sussex meant a lot of communication about release was across different NHS trusts.

By Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9266476

She told a meeting of the Royal Surrey trust board on Thursday (January 26) that conversations about getting her mum discharged were “awkward” and “difficult” as she tried to negotiate her mum’s release from hospital and whether or not she needed a care plan in place.

Board members apologised for the patient and her daughter’s experience, which included time at Haslemere Hospital, and said the trust would address issues such as communication between themselves and neighbouring trusts. Alexandra Ankrah, NExT director at the trust, sympathised with the woman’s experience, saying she had been through similar with her own mother, though not at Royal Surrey.

Addressing concerns that her mother had felt like a “bed-blocker”, where people who are medically well enough to leave hospital cannot be discharged because there may not be the appropriate social care measures in place at home, she and others in the meeting agreed they did not like the term. Ms Ankrah said: “No one should ever be made to feel that they don’t have a right to our care and services.”

The daughter, who chose not to make a complaint against the trust, said: “I felt like my mum was a prisoner.”
The meeting heard that many patients were in similar situations regarding communication across county borders, and a meeting would be organised using the patient story as a basis to make changes.

The chief executive, Louise Stead, said it came up “every single week” with people caught in “an impossible little maze”. The trust’s medical director, Bill Jewsbury, said getting people home when they were well enough was “really important” because most people wanted to be at home and improved once there. He added: “If we are really honest with ourselves, we are incredibly risk averse around discharge planning.”

Dr Jewsbury said the story was “a classic example” of saying somebody needed a care package in place before they could be discharged but said it would be “quite a powerful driver” for the family to be able to take their relatives home. He said the trust should ask itself: “Have we had that conversation with yourselves as the broader family? [Have we] phrased and pitched it in such a way as: ‘There are going to be some risks involved in perhaps getting your mother home. ‘It isn’t without risk but we can get your mother home.’”

He said it would be “worth trying” and that the hospital could do more to work with families as well as outside groups such as charities and churches in supporting patients.

The hospital’s own virtual wards, where patients can continue to be treated at home and which started late last year, were also raised as one way of helping to tackle the issue.

The daughter told the meeting: “If somebody had presented me with a disclaimer for signing mum out of the hospital, I would have done that.”

Epsom & Ewell Borough Council will carry out a number of activities to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Friday 27 January. Holocaust Memorial Day is a time to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution and those killed in the more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

The Council will light up the clocktower in Epsom Market Place in purple in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and genocide worldwide.

The Mayor, Councillor Clive Woodbridge, will give a speech which will be available to view on the Council’s YouTube channel from Friday – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0UGt6AEUCYhS3gjs4jEsyg.

An exhibition will take place at Bourne Hall, Ewell, looking at the history of the Holocaust and linking it to local stories from the Borough. Visitors will be able to place LED candles on the shrine as a mark of respect.

Virtual candles can also be lit by visiting www.illuminatethepast.org.

To learn more about the Holocaust and genocide, please visit www.hmd.org.uk.

Epsom and Ewell Borough Council

Related article:

Flight of refugees: history repeating?