Shropshire Star comment: Patched repair not yet a win
The scrapping of the decision to close the accident and emergency unit at Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital overnight will be greeted with a wave of relief by campaigners.
“We’ve won,” they can legitimately say.
Step back a moment though, and the reality is it is a defeat averted, and you don’t have to look very far ahead to see more troubles looming.
For the moment, there are plenty of positives from this 11th-hour reprieve which flow not just from the reprieve itself, but through a new atmosphere and the ripples that have been created, so Telford’s issues are not a parochial Shropshire matter, but are seen to have far-reaching implications for surrounding areas.
The A&E departments at Telford and the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital are already so busy they are failing to meet the Government’s waiting time targets and, to state the obvious, if Telford’s A&E did not take patients overnight then somewhere else, Wolverhampton for instance, would have to.
The implications of that on the workload of surrounding areas did not take long to sink in, and for those areas to realise Telford’s problems were also potentially their problems. The closure decision also had the effect of galvanising opposition and that big march in Wellington was a highly-visible demonstration of how much people care.
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While the local MPs and local council chiefs have not necessarily seen eye-to-eye in their approach, they have applied pressure in their various ways so that the lack of unity and harmony has not proven fatal to Telford’s cause.
Various solutions have been explored to address the crux of the matter, which is a lack of skilled medical staff.
These have included making housing available locally for incoming staff, and banging the drum about the merits of working at Telford among doctors and nurses from abroad.
So the really big positive to emerge is that all this has worked. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust says that a mixture of locum and agency middle grade doctors are now committed to rotas until the end of March.
This reprieve can be considered to be a patched repair, and Telford needs a change in strategic thinking if the A&E is to be safe long term.
