Crisis time in Welsh hospitals


ON MONDAY 7 February, all the acute hospitals in south-east Wales were
placed on red alert, due to serious pressure.
Dave Bartlett, the secretary of C.R.I.S.I.S (Cardiff Royal Infirmary – Save Its Services), reports that the
NHS in Welsh towns and cities such as Cardiff has been plunged into crisis.

CARDIFF’S MAIN hospital, University Hospital of Wales (UHW), is regularly
forced to close its doors to all admissions and a field hospital was opened at
Christmas in the Millennium Stadium.

C.R.I.SIS have called for the opening of an accident unit at Cardiff Royal
Infirmary (CRI) that could take pressure off UHW. The chief executive of
Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, inadvertently backed up
our demand by admitting that "the crippling problem is lack of capacity".

However, the Local Health Board (LHB), refuses to re-open CRI. Far from
building a new hospital, they want to move other facilities onto part of the
site, then sell off the rest to build a high-rise apartment block.

The Community Health Council has organised public consultation meetings on
the LHB plans. C.R.I.SIS is calling on Cardiff’s working people to come out in
their hundreds, as they have before, to oppose the LHB proposals and demand a
new hospital. In a South Wales Echo poll, 95% supported our demand to re-open
the Infirmary, but that support must be turned into action if we want to save
the hospital.

Already under-resourcing by the Labour Welsh Assembly government means that
patients at Wales’ biggest hospital, UHW, are treated "worse than animals"
according to nurses who work there.

Fiona Salter, a sister in the emergency unit, said: "We’re at the end of
our tether with the sheer number of patients that are arriving and often there
is nowhere to treat them.

"Nurses are beside themselves with feelings of guilt and going home in
tears, angry that they cannot provide the quality of care that they have been
trained to give." This is not just a January blip, she said, the crisis has
been building for two years.

The Trust shows how re-opening the hospital could be paid for. It is
spending £18.6 million this year on agency and bank nurses to cover unfilled
nursing shifts. Just recruiting and retaining nursing staff would go a long
way to re-opening the Infirmary.