HEALTH chiefs have moved to reassure councillors that their consultation on whether to close Cheshire East's only mental health inpatients unit has been done above board.

Scrutiny committee members from Cheshire East Council grilled representatives from local NHS bodies over their planned redesign of mental health services during a special meeting at Moss Rose – the home of Macclesfield Town Football Club – on Thursday.

NHS Eastern Cheshire, Vale Royal and South Cheshire clinical commissioning groups asked the public for their views on closing Macclesfield's Millbrook Unit – which would see either adult mental health patients or older patients, including those with dementia, travel to Chester for appointments.

In return, the CCGs said they would be able to fund better care in the community for mental health patients – including boosts for the home treatment and mental health teams, crisis support and dementia outreach.

Alternatively services could be kept at Millbrook, but the CCGs said they would not be able to fund improvements for their wider mental health service – and Cllr Arthur Moran, independent, suggested that message might have influenced residents who took part in the consultation.

He said: “I remember being in this committee in 2017, having very robust conversations on the subject, and being a little bit worried about whether there were some pre-conceived ideas on certain options – before consultation – that the reorganisation should go down.

“I am satisfied that the consultation has taken place, but I still have a feeling that the options left in the consultation were a still a little bit of a fait accompli.”

A total of 324 people responded to the consultation survey, and the most popular option proposed was to close Millbank, but keep older people’s inpatient care at Lime Walk House, in Macclesfield, and improve community care.

Fifty-two per cent of respondents agreed with that option, compared to 36.1 per cent who agreed with the option to keep Millbank open, but without extra support for community care.

But Cllr Jill Rhodes, Labour, questioned the validity of that survey when so few people responded to it.

“Less than five per cent of the people who were sent the questionnaire actually replied,” she said.

“We are told that there are less than half a million people in our population, yet this actual survey only covers 324 people. Do you think your survey was really robust?”

Jacki Wilkes, associate director of commissioning at NHS Eastern Cheshire CCG, told the committee that the survey was just one of the ways patients were consulted – and looked to reassure members that the public was not pushed into supporting the closure of Millbank.

She said: “What we have tried to do throughout the process is be really clear about the case for change, and the process itself has driven the number of options to take out. The evidence is the evidence, which we have laid out for people to see.

“No decision has been made and I think it is really important to make that point that a decision cannot be made until we have presented the decision-making business case to our governing bodies.

“We put option one [to keep Millbrook] in the public domain because it is a viable option, but there are consequences of choosing that option that we have been very open and transparent about.

“We will have had scrutiny by an independent senate, and it will have had to go by our external regulators to make sure it has gone through due process.”

A business case based on the consultation’s findings will be presented to the governing bodies of the three CCGs in November before a decision is made on whether to close Millbrook.