Health bosses have admitted emergency care will stop overnight at Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr (YYF) despite promises the Medical Assessment Unit would remain open.
The unit, in Ystrad Mynach, will shut for a “short period of time” from February 1 due to staffing problems after a dispute between the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board (ABUHB) and the Wales Deanery regarding junior doctors.
However, a whistleblower contacted Caerphilly Observer and claimed senior doctors had been told the unit will close at the end of the month.
ABUHB confirmed junior doctors will provide night time cover but senior nurses need to be recruited before this happens.
An ABUHB spokesman said: “Doctors at consultant level to provide daytime cover, seven days a week, for patients requiring treatment for a medical condition are in place, and the non-training grade junior doctor rota to ensure safe night time cover has been arranged.
“We also need to recruit the necessary senior advanced nurse practitioners and this is also underway.
“This means there will be no emergency intake to the Medical Assessment Unit for a very short period of time.
“Overnight new emergency admissions will be directed to the Royal Gwent Hospital. Following this short disruption, the intention is that we will then start to allow a controlled and clinically safe resumption of the full service to admit patients 24/7.”
Councillor Colin Mann, leader of the Plaid Cymru group on Caerphilly County Borough Council has raised the issue with the chief executive of ABUHB.
He said:“I understand that there will be a short time period until doctors are in place to cover the night time hours but look forward to, at least, the previous level of service being restored in the very near future. It is very important to build up the reputation of YYF as, unfortunately, many people still remember some of the teething troubles which arose in the early days after the hospital opened.
“I hear frequent requests from people in the area for as many services as possible to be provided at Ystrad Mynach so that the need for long and inconvenient commuting out of the area is kept to the absolute minimum.
“Residents of the borough should be able to have confidence in the local services.”
I wonder if senior members of the Aneurin Bevan board will now devote their time to finding out who blew the whistle?
The reason people have no confidence in Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr is that they were promised a hospital and have not been given one. I remember that when we were fighting to save the Miners Hospital that no politician, of any party, admitted that the new £172 Million building would not have doctors and A & E. If they had done so then maybe, just maybe, public pressure may have forced the health authority to continue to provide hospital cover within the Borough.
So, the health authority deliberatly diverting people to A&E .
What a perverse proposal considering A&E`s are said to be at braking point and beyond already, we will have these very same health board officials, and board members, blaming members of the public for overloading an already failing A&E facility, add this new dimension to the fact that it can take up to four weeks to see a local GP and it is glaringly obvious why the NHS in WALES is seen to be failing every efficiency indicator there is, and is being picked on by English Politicians as a busted flush.
Welsh Assemby Politicians should have the guts to INSTRUCT this Health Board to get its act together or place them under special measures to ensure that a Patient centered health provision is what is delivered under the current Boards Political and administrative leadership. There are NO current Welsh Assemby Politicans with the guts to do it, all talk the talk butit ends there. Disgraceful.
I also hear sounds about difficulties in maintaining the Radioligy Unit at Ystrad Mynach Hospital? how long before this local facility closes for good?
If you read the article properly, you will see that the closure affects the MAU facility, not A and E as you have stated, so this will have no direct impact on the throughput in our A and E facility. In terms of placing us in special measures, I think you need to research into how this sort of action takes place, from my 15 years working in the NHS, it does not happen to health boards like ABUHB, which in comparison to the UK wide NHS performance statistics ranks very well considering the health population in Gwent and the comorbidities and long term chronic conditions which are far more prevalent in the Gwent community vs the population it serves. The mistake you have made is taking your information from one unreliable source and making a decision based upon this
narrow perspective.
It`s you, who have made the mistake in not reading MY comments properly.
We all know we do not have the promised A&E unit at this cottage hospital, my comments relate to the health board, yet again, taking action which will increase visits to A&E at OTHER HOSPITALS within the Boards area of operation. Units in which staff are already working to braking point, and I would add if it was not for the complete dedication of staff at these facilities in going beyond what should reasonably be expected of them,, the entire system would totally implode.
It is not rocket science for members of the public to realise when a system is under pressure, and to see the Health Board itself heaping further pressure on that part of a failing system is management ineptitude at the very least, and the only people to be effected, again, are the public, the patients who form the basis of a patient centred provision, the NHS is not designed to accommodate and satisfy administrators and managers, it is there to accommodate the patients who pay for it.
If you are offended by my reasonable comments, and, you do so because you work in the Health Service and know more about it than I do, perhaps you would like to give a view on the following comment I also made, and make again here,”I also hear sounds about difficulties in maintaining the Radioligy Unit
at Ystrad Mynach Hospital? how long before this local facility closes
for good?
If my comments are considered by you to be `narrow perspectives` It is no wonder that administrators and managers in the ABHB do not consider patient centered facilities as a top priority but more narrow perspectives,
Not only does this article reveal how powerless and useless councillors are, but the shocking state of the NHS in Wales, and Britain as a whole.
Health is devolved to Cardiff, I agree that this Assembly is useless but not entirely powerless. Councillors can only look on with the dismay shared by the general public. I also agree that the state of the Health Service is bad, it can do some things very well but it would take a fanatical idealist, or a politician, to say that major improvements are not required.
I have said it before, but believe it needs to be said again, local health care in this town is worse than it was forty years ago. As we live in the the fifth richest economy in the world this is disgraceful.
Health may well be devolved but I would expect greater interconnectedness between the council and Cardiff. The council seems to be reading off a different page altogether. When something local happens in your area one should be able to complain to the council and know their complaint will make a difference. At the moment the councillors complain only to have their complaints brushed aside
Local authority is great in theory but it needs to have a stronger relationship with wider authority.
Exactly, which is why I would like to see eight county councils in Wales (we would be in Glamorgan) instead of twenty two. The Welsh Assembly could then be abolished in favour of a more local system of government.
This still leaves the problems in the National Health Service though and that wil take more than throwing tax payers money at it to cure. There needs to be an examination on the way the service provides care from GP surgeries upward. Doctors I have spoken with are all very uneasy about the current system which is not sustainable. This concerns me deeply, as it should everyone, as we are all potential patients.
Richard, Dean: why would any labour Councillor, or indeed a body of them cting as a `Council`, complain to and about the Welsh Assembly, a Labour Welsh Assembly?
If they did, and if they `pressed` those complaints with the backing of the local community, they would be seen as `off message`, and be branded, `divisive`, and would be threatened by some local political mover and shaker apparatchik. , with expulsion, or hanging by the neck
until they are dead. (drawing and quartered having been abolished), the singing from the same hymn sheet is very important to most politicians regardless of the way that makes the populous feel, disengaged and isolated from politics.
What they fail to accept is that a healthy party is one which engages with people with all sorts of opinions and views, when they fail to do so, and are seen to do so, they end up as introverted, isolationist, and discriminatory organisations, this then allows the growth of parties like UKIP who will listen, will debate, and will form policy by doing so. People then feel politicians are listening to them,
Yes Trefor, your reasoning rings true. The only party that today allows a degree of autonomy and free thought amongst its members is UKIP. This was not always the case, I remember when Harold Wilson could articulate a positive case for belonging to what was then the common market at the very same time that Peter Shore pointed out his opposition to it. Both remained senior and respected figures in the party, which accepted that there was a range of views within it.
This is no longer the case, Gordon Brown calling a Labour voter a “bigotted woman” and then grovelling when he was caught out. David Cameron calling his own activists “swivel eyed Loons” because they don’t agree with some of the policies he holds dear. Time for a change as this spin doctor led promotion of the views of the Hampstead set has turned people against politics.