BY the time you’re reading this, a decision will have been announced on the future of the Friarage Hospital’s children and maternity departments.

That’s “announced” not “made”, as the decision was made a couple of weeks ago at a meeting held behind closed doors. It was to be announced on Thursday by a video posed on a website.

Apparently a Finnish-speaking robot locked in a secret bunker beneath James Cook Hospital has been programmed to deliver the announcement.

The robot will speak in a code which members of the public will have to decipher by searching for clues on the bottom of tins of Spam. That’s all true apart from the stuff about the robot.

The decision will either be a midwife-led service or a midwife-led service as those were the only ones on the table during the very transparent and open consultation process. The decision was made by GPs across Hambleton and Richmondshire.

Hopefully, they paid attention during the lecture on making really big decisions on NHS services, which were presumably sandwiched in between the anatomy and biology lessons.

It’s difficult to find anything new to say about the saga, to be honest.Instead of wellpaid consultants driving between hospitals to work, we’ll have heavily pregnant women driving between hospitals to give birth.

Writing on her personal blog about the decision-making process, the architect of the changes, Dr Vicky Pleydell, chief clinical officer at Hambleton, Richmondshire and Whitby Clinical Commissioning Group, said that “none of us know what the public really think”.

Very true, Dr Pleydell. What did those 4,000 people who marched through Northallerton, the 10,000 people who signed the petition, or the thousands who turned up at public meetings really think?

Maybe what they – and the silent minority – wanted was a service that was a bit more pants than the one they had before.

Just for the record, in Burnley they have the wonderfully named Lancashire Women and Newborn Centre, which has shed-loads of consultants.