Criticism of care at Ulster Hospital

Criticism of care at Ulster Hospital

19 March 2014

TWO people recounted experiences of loved ones who have attended the Ulster Hospital’s emergency department in recent weeks.

Roy Neill and Mairead Baker both provided a snapshot of what it’s like at the Ulster’s emergency department, calling for 24-hour A&E services to be available at the Downe.

Mr. Neill said he went to the Dundonald hospital with his mother-in-law, who is a resident at the Hamilton Fold in Ballynahinch. He explained she had to be taken by ambulance to the Ulster by paramedics who had been despatched from Kilkeel.

“When I arrived at the Ulster Hospital the scene in the emergency department was something like you would see in the Lebanon,” he told the public meeting. “I have never before witnessed anything like it in my life.

The place was crowded and the doctors and nurses were running.”

Mr. Neill described the current A&E crisis affecting a number of hospitals as an “absolute shambles,” suggesting that as the Downe Hospital has been open for five years, it must have been in the planning process for at least that length of time before it opened.

“Where is the forward planning in the health department?” he asked. “We are paying people hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to forward plan and what do we get, a shambles,” he declared.

Mr. Neill added: “Politicians are here tonight and they need to take a loud message from Ballynahinch that we are having no more of this and want to keep the Downe Hospital’s A&E service open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what we want and that’s what we are getting.”

Mairead revealed that this time last year the Downe Hospital saved her mother’s life after she took a heart attack on a Saturday morning.

But she revealed when her sister became ill last week and was taken to the Ulster Hospital, the experience was altogether different.

“My sister was initially taken to the Downe, but was subsequently transferred to the Ulster. When I visited her later she told me that if our mum was ever taken to hospital in Dundonald to ‘never leaver her alone’.”

Mairead added: “My sister was taken to the A&E unit and then put into a side room with doctors walking past her. She feels she was forgotten about. This was a disgrace and an example of why we need the Downe Hospital.”