Appalled at the pressure hospital staff are facing at St John’s

Dec 18 2008 West Lothian Courier

I WAS a patient in St John’s Hospital last week and was witness to the pressures being applied to staff by the Health Board.

The management team at St John’s are starving the wards of experienced staff and resources.

This is being done to save money as Lothian Health Board’s multi-million pound deficit climbs ever higher.

On Monday, December 8, I realised that a clinical support worker had been left in sole charge of Ward 22 for over three hours! The person concerned wasn’t even a trained staff nurse.

For me, this is proof that “Lothian” Health’s Board considers “West” Lothian patients to be second class citizens.

Can you imagine a support worker being left in charge of an emergency ward at the Royal Infirmary? Of course not. This is only considered acceptable at St John’s.

Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Constance and Fiona Hyslop, together with the West Lothian SNP, made much of the St John’s situation during the election and condemned Labour for their health policies.

The SNP offered local healthcare but now they seem to have abandoned us. We might as well have voted Labour.

St John’s is a hospital which we need at the heart of our community. But it’s not enough to have the shell of a building without skilled and experienced staff running the wards.

It’s not enough to have a short-stay surgical centre which just deals with nine to five patients while the really sick patients are sent miles away to Edinburgh.

No, we need St John’s to be run properly and serving all emergency patients 24/7.

From my own experience this is simply not happening at present. at the hospital

How can the Health Board be allowed to get away with this neglect of emergency patients and what are our politicians, especially the SNP and the hospital councillors doing about it?

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