Ambulance call

A mishap on Sunday morning resulted in an emergency trip to our local accident and emergency department for Huw. Withybush hospital which serves the whole of Pembrokeshire is 15 miles away and took us not much more than 30 minutes to reach. Once there he was examined and treated quickly and efficiently and was home by early afternoon.
The hospital has more than met our expectations on a number of occasions, both planned and not, over the past 20 years. But for some time now it's been blighted by plans to downgrade it to cottage hospital status, starting with the removal of obstetrics and of paediatric emergency services and progressing to the removal of several other specialities and of 24-hour emergency services altogether, meaning that patients requiring immediate attention would be required to travel another 30 miles, a minimum 45 minutes driving time, to A&E at Glangwili Hospital Carmarthen in the next county. The ambulance person I was talking on the way said that Glangwili was already unable to cope with the demand on its A&E services but we the public are at the mercy of the highly-paid administrators who call the shots.

Several well-documented incidents attest to the fact that mothers and babies would have died if they had not been able to receive emergency care at Withybush, and many other casualties would not have survived the delay involved in reaching Carmarthen with life-threatening conditions. Plans have been mooted to build a huge new hospital to serve both counties but meanwhile the axe remains poised over Withybush and we are among many who have been involved protestations and demonstrations to try and save it. But the juggernaut of change is a very difficult to halt.

(Huw is recovering but I've been too shattered to do anything blip-wise)