We should be expanding, not cutting, NHS services (From Swindon Advertiser)

We should be expanding, not cutting, NHS services

2:42pm Tuesday 10th October 2006

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I AM a nurse on the heart assessment centre at Arrowe Park Hospital. We have been told that our ward is to close.

To anyone who doesn't know our unit very well, we were moved from Ward 18 about a year and a half ago to a unit next door to A&E. We consist of a 17-bed medical ward catering for cardiology and general medical patients and a 12-bed unit, with six cardiac monitors, which takes admissions from A&E. These consist of chest pain and arrhythmia patients.

It is a busy unit with an incredible turnover which last month alone took in 270 patients into 12 beds.

The management proposals are to close down the whole 29-bed ward by next March and transfer the heart assessment centre to a cardiology ward upstairs, cutting their medical beds also. The environment we work in is an extremely busy one, often having a name for our next available bed before it is empty.

I do not know how the hospital is going to cope.

We are a very dedicated, hard-working team of nurses who have put a lot into this ward to set it up and make it work. When the move took place to set up this unit, the staff were told it was the best move they would ever make, now we are told we are being re-deployed into other posts - posts in which our skills will be appropriate. This is not the case, however, as there are hardly any posts within the Trust, as new student nurses have discovered.

We are all devastated. We all get on well personally and work great as a team professionally. Now we are going to be split up.

Speaking to patients in my care, most of them comment on how friendly and clean our ward environment is, while staff in A&E comment on how the transition of patient care has become very effective with not so many four hour waiting targets in A&E, as set up by the Government, being breached since the unit was set up.

As coronary artery disease is one of the major risk factors to health in this modern age, surely we should be expanding services not cutting back?

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