I’m passionate that our local public services, such as the health service, should be as much part of their local community as possible – and indeed accountable to them.

So when the Whittington hospital started asking people to sign up as ‘members’ of it, as part of its bid to become an NHS Foundation Trust, I signed up. And when they invited local people to put themselves forward potentially to be on their ‘Council of Governors’, I submitted a nomination for that too. With about 3,500 members of the trust (excluding staff), and a huge area, containing the whole of Islington, Camden and Hackney, as well as parts of the City and Westminster, electing just six people to the Council, it was fairly obviously going to be a quite hotly contested election. But I was keen to be involved and play my part in ensuring that the hospital’s management are responsive to local people, and so I resolved to give it a try. And if you were one of the, er, one or two local residents that I asked to sign up as members too, thanks very much for doing so.

But in fact in the end there were considerably fewer nominations than I’d expected – just five for the six places in the ‘Public Whittington South’ constituency I am part of.

This means that at some point soon I will definitely become a member of the hospital’s Council of Governors. I am really looking forward to getting stuck in and starting to discover more about how the hospital works and, I hope, contributing something.

Last night the hospital hosted a gathering for members of the trust, to meet their candidates, I guess to help them decide how to vote - the other constituencies on the Council do have contested elections: 11 candidates for 4 places for the public ‘north’ constituency of Haringey and Barnet, and also contested elections in the patient and staff categories. It was a pleasant occasion, in a third floor atrium in the new building with great views out over north London. Members, or voters, were somewhat predictably heavily outnumbered by candidates, hospital staff and Board members, but I did get to meet a few of the former, and for me it was certainly very handy to meet many of the various people there, before the first proper meeting of the Council on 1 April.

I gather that the hospital may well not have received its final authorisation (from Monitor and the Secretary of State) to become a Foundation Trust by then, which means the new governance arrangements can’t actually start, but it is planned to run the Council as a Shadow Council. That seems a good idea to me – the list of fairly crucial decisions that it was originally planned for the first meeting seemed to me slightly alarming for a grouping whose members had not even really met each other yet.

The Foundation Trust system is not exactly the model I myself would have suggested for improving NHS trusts’ relationship with and accountability to their local community. The Whittington have put a lot of effort into signing up members and have done a good job in getting more than 4,000 local people to do so. But that is still barely more than 1% of the population it serves (and a fairly unrepresentative 1% - all 5 of the ‘South’ governors are white, for example). One of the candidates said to me last night 1% is better than 0%, and I guess that’s right – just about.

Nevertheless it clearly is a start - and membership is still rising fast - and I look forward to trying to contribute something as a local resident – while quite properly not interfering in the actual on the ground management of the hospital by its Board and staff. There remain some who oppose any public involvement in running the health service, on the grounds that you can’t have non-professionals interfering in clinical decisions. That’s a highly disingenuous, and indeed quite simply wrong, argument: clearly how you treat patients, and how you manage the hospital generally is a matter for professionals rather than interested outsiders – but just what it is in a strategic sense that the hospital does, and the way it goes about it, is very much a question for local people. As David Sloman, the Whittington’s Chief Executive, said last night, we have actually paid for it, and it is our hospital. Local government, for example, operates a clear model for splitting strategic decisions of wide public interest, from detailed professional decisions – as do schools, who are accountable to governors, but do not allow them to interfere, for example, in specific teaching techniques.

So this is an interesting time for the hospital, under new governance arrangements, as well as for me in getting more involved in it. If you live locally, please do sign up as a member of the hospital – you won’t even now have to decide whether to vote for me or not!