A SIGNIFICANT proportion of the population of Fermanagh has now added its voice to the campaign to save services at the South West Acute Hospital.
With the Western Trust consultation on the future of emergency general surgery at the Enniskillen hospital coming to an end this week – on April 10th – in recent weeks the dedicated volunteer team from Save Our Acute Services (SOAS) has been hard at work around the county providing letters to the public to sign, voicing their support for the group’s alternative vision for the SWAH.
Many others in the community, from schools to clubs to businesses, have also been distributing the letters, which were then gathered at Fermanagh House last night where the counting by the volunteers got underway in ernest.
At the time of going to press, counting was continuing, but SOAS estimated the total number of letters received was already in its tens of thousands. These will now be presented to the Trust at the SWAH this week.
Letters are also still coming in, and anyone in the community that has yet to return their signed copies can still get in touch with the SOAS group, either through direct message on the group’s Facebook page, or by emailing soas.swah@gmail.com.
A spokeswoman for SOAS said the group had been “overwhelmed” by the community response to the campaign, calling it “powerful.”
“We will be handing over so many pieces of paper signed by so many generations of people, from all of the community,” they said. “We started off as a campaign, and we are now a community.”
The letters the community have been putting their names to contain a summarised version of SOAS’ five-point plan, part of its vision for a ‘new SWAH’, and are available at clubs, business, churches and shops all over Fermanagh. While SOAS itself has already printed around 30,000 copies of the letter, many others are also printing their own for their customers or members to sign.
The SOAS spokeswoman said that while each letter may contain the same information, every single one was the voice of a local person having their say on the future of the hospital, and should be treated as such by the Western Trust for the purpose of the consultation.
“It may look like one response, but what they are getting is a representation of our community,” they said.
Commending the volunteers who had “put their lives on hold” for the past few weeks, the spokeswoman said the group had also had a fantastic response to its recent public meetings, where the group presented fresh, updated data on the current situation at the SWAH.
“When we decided to put on public meetings this month we realised we were presenting entirely different information, and also that the public were hungry, were aware they were being treated as second class, and were ready for an alternative to the situation we have found ourselves,” they said.
Finally, and vitally, the spokeswoman noted that the Department of Health’s own guidelines and consultation mechanisms – which had been quoted by Trust chief executive Neil Guckian – stated that if a viable alternative solution was found during the consultation, the Trust would be obliged to implement it.
Stressing the five point plan set out on the letters did exactly that, the spokeswoman said, “They will be getting a viable alternative by the box load.
“We brought the community together to discuss what is a very logical, viable alternative to the Trust’s position, where they have failed us in their decisions to remove equal access to urgent surgery and emergency surgery.”
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