Hospital built £700k helipad a year ago... and still can’t use it!
NHS chiefs spent £700,000 at a cash-strapped hospital on a helipad which has never been used – because it doesn’t have enough lights.
It was built for emergency night-time take- offs and landings by rescue helicopters and was due to start handling emergency flights in March last year.
However, more than a year later, the pad has not been used for a flight. Experts say it does not have enough lights on it for night-time take-offs and landings to be conducted safely.
Installation at the Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, was completed in March 2017 and paid for by the Labour-run NHS in Wales.
Vaughan Gething, who is the Welsh Assembly secretary of health, praised the helipad at the time for helping to ‘ensure those critically ill patients who need care as fast as possible, by air, day or night, can get that care’. Mr Gething said: ‘ This is all part of our commitment to delivering a modern and effective health service that the people of Wales deserve.’
The new helipad was built next to the Emergency Care Centre at the hospital.
Emergency helicopters are still using the hospital’s old helipad but patients have to be transferred by ambulance to the hospital building. It cannot be used in darkness.
The health board expects the new helipad to be ready for use ‘in the next few months’. A spokesman for Cwm Taf University health board said: ‘It is essential to ensure that all safety measures are in place for landings and take-offs prior to the service becoming live.
‘These measures have now been trialled. A night-flight landing was also required, after which the service operators and specialist aviation advisors confirmed that additional lighting and fencing was needed to support night flight operations.’
The Labour-run Welsh NHS is struggling under a toxic combination of swingeing cuts and crippling staff shortages. In 2015, an official Government report found it lagged behind England in almost every way.
Patients in Wales wait far longer for life-saving treatment and critical tests than those over the border.
Incredibly, the target for treating cancer cases has not been met for seven years.
In September last year, a study found that the Welsh NHS needs an extra £500million to meet demand.
And a month before that, figures revealed that the number of people waiting more than a year for an operation in Wales has risen by more than 400 per cent in the past four years.
A Freedom of Information request by the Royal College of Surgeons revealed the number waiting more than 12 months for surgery in the year ending March 2017 was 3,605. In March 2013, the figure was 699.
The number of patients waiting more than a year for treatment in England – which has more than 17 times the population of Wales – was just 1,302.