MUCH has been made of the great facilities available at the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, but there is no provision made for the rehabilitation of brain-damaged patients, who are moved to Murdostoun Brain Injury centre, a location so remote that no public transport is available. The advice given to relatives who don't drive is to take a bus to Newmains and then phone a taxi to get to the centre. The fare is £5 each way.
My son is one who had a serious brain injury and who received excellent treatment at the nuerology department of the new hospital but had to be moved out to Murdostoun because of lack of follow-up provision.
I know that senior staff feel that such a facility should be made to free up beds in the acute trauma unit which serves the whole of Scotland.
Murdostoun is part of the Huntercombe group, which is a private provider costing a great deal of money. Why can't the NHS put this money towards its own accessible unit? We are told how important it is for brain-injured patients to see known faces and hear familiar voices on a regular basis. This is just about impossible with the present arrangement.
Margaret Symington,
3 Erskine Avenue, Glasgow.
IS the NHS hard-working? Yes. Could it be more efficient? Probably, but then again so could every other sphere of endeavour even the House of Lords where peers can be observed fast asleep during debates. The latest statistics on the political football that is A&E (“Ministers urged to deal with delays at A&E units”, The Herald, September 9) gave the Lib-Dem spokesman the opportunity to take a hack at the Health Secretary who, to continue the analogy, is the chairman of the club, not the manager of the team and not the owner of the club. Had the aspirational target had been set at 90 per cent rather than 95 per cent, which all the boards achieved, would the opposition still complain? You can bet your last dollar they would. Again the tone of your article could have been one of “the overwhelming majority of patients attending A&E departments are treated timeously” so why wasn’t it?
A&E departments work with an unpredictable caseload of varying degrees of complexity that has to be addressed within finite resources that are not evenly spread and are constrained by factors such as bed occupancy over which they have no control. In an ideal world with a generously funded Health Service A&E patients would never have to wait at all. Perhaps the opposition parties have a source of funding not available to the current Health Secretary who is working subject to the limitations of a budget ultimately set by a Westminster government who are intent on further reducing Scotland’s block grant and with it NHS spending.
David J Crawford,
Flat 3/3 131 Shuna Street, Glasgow.
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