ON Wednesday you devoted a two page spread to our local hospital entitled Hospital beds may go private and pointed out that the Great Western Hospital is to cut 99 jobs and leave another 99 vacancies unfilled in a bid to save £2.2m.
The cutback in NHS facilities did not stop there however, for Malmesbury Community Hospital's maternity and minor injury units have already been closed, and there are proposals to close Westbury, Devizes, Bradford on Avon, Trowbridge and Warminster community hospitals.
These closures are taking place while something of the order of 2,000 patients are awaiting admission to our local hospital, a wait that may well shorten some of their lives, and the primary reason for this delay in admitting these patients is lack of hospital capacity, in some cases failure to utilise capacity that already exists but lies unused.
On the following day you ran the headline No-show patients cost GWH £2.6m but I would suggest to you that this statement is incorrect. It may be that because of no-show patients staff were not as fully occupied as they might have been and that there was as a result a waste of money but that waste did not cost GWH anything as the staff concerned would have been employed anyway. What would be exceedingly interesting to know is why so many patients seemingly failed to attend outpatients clinics. Are the figures correct, how long had patients been waiting, had the inadequacy of the car parking arrangements anything to do with the problem? These are but some of the questions that need to be researched.
DR C O LISTER
Swindon
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article