FERMANAGH activists from the Save Our Acute Services (SOAS) travelled to Castle Buildings at Stormont today to deliver over 19,000 individual responses from the county to the Department of Health’s public consultation on the future of obesity services. The local responses call for a specialist bariatric surgery hub to be located at the South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen.
The volunteers, including members of the SOAS Community Committee who have been hard at work gathering the thousands of responses across Fermanagh in recent weeks, delivered the forms directly to the Department this afternoon.
SOAS has noted bariatric surgery service, which forms part of the Department’s consultation, was previously promised for the SWAH in 2019, with necessary equipment purchased but never proceeded.
“Instead, the hospital had emergency general surgery temporarily removed in 2022 leaving more than 83,000 people 2 hours away from life-saving acute or emergency surgery,” a spokesman said.
“The campaign argues that SWAH has the capacity to deliver bariatric surgery and alongside a broader commitment to restore emergency general surgery could provide a pathway to do that sustainably into the future.”
Locating specialist surgery services, such as bariatric, at the SWAH forms part of the SOAS ‘five point plan’ for restoring emergency general surgery at the SWAH. The campaign group previously submitted more than 30,000 individual consultation responses from residents in Fermanagh and Tyrone backing that plan.
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