With No A&E, Expect More Deaths!
Stan Says: Local A&E Hospitals SAVE LIVES.
The Hywel Dda Health Board proposes drastic changes to how hospital services are provided in Pembrokeshire.
To provide context for those of you not very familiar with the latest intricacies of the Welsh NHS’s decision making:
The Labour Welsh Government, and the quasi-independent Hywel Dda health board who are answerable to them, have just recommended downgrading both Withybush Hospital, Pembrokeshire, and the next nearest A&E at Gwangwili, in Carmarthenshire. That’s 12 times further than the average emergency distance admission in England.
They propose a Salami Slicing of cuts to Withybush general hospital Services which means that they will no longer have a fully functioning A&E department. In doing so children who require emergency care will be faced with traveling for upwards of sixty minutes, even longer if they live in more rural areas just to have that life-saving emergency care.
A time scale that will put lives at risk.
Withybush County hospital in Carmathen will no longer be treating children in A & E, they will have to go to other hospitals.
If you add the time to wait for an ambulance to get to where a patient may be, stabilising the patient, then transporting that patient to a hospital that is beyond the borders of the county. Crucial minutes lost in a situation where time is a critical factor.
In 2018 a 40,000 signatures petition appeared to have secured its future only to be ignored three years later.
The Welsh Government can, and does, try to shift the blame, and claim all downgrade decisions are based on the clinician-led recommendations from Hywel Dda Health board.
But Steve Moore, CEO, of the Health Board, allegedly claimed on BBC news yesterday (I did not see the interview in person), that “Pembrokeshire is little more than a retirement village”.
This is the reality of modern Wales.
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Thank you Welsh Labour!!
Absolutely
Written by “Anonymous”
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[Ed: the writer of this letter is known to me. He desires to remain anonymous for the time being, for obvious reasons.]
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Dear Sir,
I’d like to tell you and your readers about the situation in Wales, from the HGV driver shortage to the NHS, as observed by me.
For example, I’ve been working at the old LG site near Newport, Wales, for over twelve months, throughout this so-called pandemic. It is now a gigantic storage warehouse for NHS Wales. You can literally turn your jumbo jets inside it. A few snippets you may be interested to know. I dislike Drakeford – but I must try to be fair: I have seen no shortage of NHS equipment of any sort.
We’ve had lorries to unload from as far apart as Turkey and Finland as well as many hundreds of British hauliers. We have also been paid to go down to Cardiff Airport and unload chartered Russian aircraft that have flown in goods from China such as rubber gloves. They now cost over a million pounds per articulated lorry full.
It’s been bloody hard graft and I’ve been getting home completely exhausted, often having worked seven days a week. Whereas the fold-up frames for the beds came from Turkey on the lorries, the mattresses and electronics were all British made. It was all high quality stuff. They bought a thousand beds. We worked our arses off getting them loaded onto our own trucks for delivery to the Millennium Stadium etc, to the famous Nightingale Hospitals. A few weeks later, it all came back. Unused. Then most of the beds and mattresses and a ventilator for each got given to India. That’s what was said. It was given to India. Millions of pounds worth.
These last few weeks I’ve been loading sea containers bound for Namibia, with seven million pounds worth of stuff such as hand sanitizer, body bags etc. The last two pallets on each container get a Welsh flag sticker, with “A present from the people of Wales” in English and Welsh written on it. Then the door gets sealed and off it goes to Felixstowe. I’m still scratching my head to know what I think of it being given to Namibia. But I already know what I think about it going to India!
Regarding the lorry driver shortage. I’ve not seen any shortage of Polish etc drivers bringing goods into our place in British registered trucks and I recently wrote to The South Wales Argus, in reply to one moaning idiot, to tell him so. But I have to say, I admire the way the Finns seem to do things. We get a weekly truck from Turku in Finland, of dry ice. Very clean, very proud looking vehicles. On the side or back of every one of them it says in big letters in English: Finnish Truck. Finnish Driver. Legal Licences.
I talk to loads of drivers. Many literally live in their cabs. The foreign ones. Or even the foreign ones who are driving for British companies. It’s mad. We get a weekly delivery of an articulated lorry full of Ethanol. It always comes on a Dutch registered trailer but is pulled by a Polish or Romanian cab that’s driven from Poland or Romania, to hitch up a trailer in Zeebrugge, to bring to Newport, Wales!
A while ago I was in the fire service. A national organisation that had too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It’s the same in the NHS. The wastage in the NHS is bloody criminal. When I worked for Boots, the amount of drugs wasted was mind boggling. Next Wednesday, I have a video interview to be a candidate for REFORM UK. If successful, I’ll be passing on what I’ve seen in my working life, Including the day I opened a cupboard in Duffryn Fire Station, expecting to find batteries and found a load of fire service badge condoms instead.
No doubt Starmer would say I’m trying to privatise the fire service. Actually I’m not, but Denmark is officially the happiest country on earth apparently and the fire service is very well operated there by FALCK and the Danes are proud of it and I’d much rather work for a happy FALCK than a pissed off West Midlands or Merseyside service.
He’d say I’m trying to privatise the NHS. I won’t be. But he hasn’t seen the piles of uncollected medicines at each Boots every month either. One month at Boots Cwmbran, the estimate was fifty five thousand pounds worth of uncollected medicines. One month. One shop. And it’s the same in all pharmacies, Boots or not, and that’s without what gets vastly over-prescribed and delivered to people’s homes, then has to be thrown away because it’s left the shop. At least the stuff that’s not collected can be re-used because it hasn’t left the shop. But Boots then gets paid twice for it. They think it’s mad as well. And this is just in Wales ….
Respectfully, “Anonymous”