Help us to save the A&E at Royal Glamorgan Hospital

LAST week we received the news that the dreaded South Wales Programme is being resurrected after six years, in terms of accident and emergency configuration.

This means consultant-led services are recommended for removal from the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, whose sole consultant is set to retire in April.

In contrast, the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend has eight consultants in A&E, and the Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr has the equivalent of fourand-a-half.

Many people are questioning how and why this disparity has been allowed to develop.

People are also questioning whether they will be able to get to hospital in time in an emergency. I’ve heard from people this week who say they would have died, or even worse – that their child would have died – had they been forced to travel further afield than the Royal Glamorgan Hospital.

The result of this proposal will be grave.

The Royal Glamorgan has the busiest A&E of the three district general hospitals under Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board.

No-one has yet been able to answer the concerns about the ambulance response times, or the fact that a significant number of people living in the Rhondda are without a car.

And that, in my view, is outrageous. People have little faith that their legitimate concerns will be taken into account following the sham consultation that was run back in 2014, where 60,000 people said that they didn’t want the changes to go ahead, and those voices were ignored.

Since this devastating news broke, many people have got in touch to express their anger, frustration and fears for the future of hospital provision in Rhondda and beyond. As a resident of the Rhondda, I share those concerns.

The towns and villages at the top of the Rhondda Fach and Fawr can access Prince Charles Hospital relatively quickly via the Maerdy and Rhigos mountain roads.

However, Rhondda residents who regularly use that route know that that’s a dangerous assumption to make, because in the winter those roads are often closed.

As far as I and many thousands of others living in the Rhondda are concerned, we are best served by having a 24-hour, consultant-led accident and emergency department operating out of the Royal Glamorgan Hospital.

As we’ve seen with the centralisation of maternity services in Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board, it’s not a solution for the deep-rooted problems faced by the Welsh NHS, namely understaffed and overworked personnel.