RECENTLY announced by the NHS PCT will be the spending of another £1 million on a part of the NHS that we assumed we already had ie; an updated modern facility for expectant mothers.
And to further confuse us, we are told quite categorically that the closing or reduction of these services are in our best interest.
Let’s just for a moment place ourselves in the position of a pregnant mother.
I am having severe contractions e
very 10 minutes, and I live in Bridlington.
According to the NHS spokesperson the journey from Bridlington to Scarborough takes 20 minutes. Try making Bridlington in 20 minutes from Scarborough, it took me 45 minutes to reach Osgodby Top from the town centre.
My waters have broken, my address is Whitby. Tough, lady, you will have enough time to give birth near the turn-off to Ravenscar (and God forbid if your address is Ravenscar) or possibly not if your problem occurs on a busy weekend, or any weekend or in winter when we have 4in of snow on the A170-171-165 ... and so on and so forth.
My contractions are every five minutes, Malton is where I live. No problem, the A64 runs directly to Scarborough.
Certainly it does, and has done for years. What it has now are monumental traffic jams any weekend/bank holiday/car crash. The ambulance can deviate, sure it can, on to a road just as busy as the A64. Try the Pickering road on a sunny day/weekend/railway festival/day trip to the coast.
I realise I paint a bleak picture and we could have a polyclinic in our town centre, where if I were a drug addict or an alcoholic I would receive treatment.
I also recall that Bridlington waited more than 20 years for its “new” hospital (the original site is now a community tip and a site for travellers).
Whitby, Malton or Bridlington do not lack proper facilities.
All they want is adequate funding and staff, and to say that the NHS cannot find the staff required is nonsense, when to reduce cost staff are made redundant. The service needs those trained members of their profession. Judging by the amount of people wandering around any hospital carrying a clipboard and looking very important, I would suggest the dismissal of 50 per cent of administrators to start with.
To suggest that a vital service is to be withdrawn is to add insult to us the public and to the caring people that man the front line in our hospitals large or small. The citizens of this country require a facility which is their right in a modern civilised society.
R Marshall
Elmville Avenue, Scarborough
The full article contains 458 words and appears in Scarborough Evening News newspaper.
