Crumpton speaks out on local health service

Martin Crumpton, chair of Keep Llangollen Special, gives a personal take on the local health service...

"When they said ‘North Wales’s health is changing’ they neglected to mention it would be for the worse. I think I can speak with some authority; I’ve just come off the Terminally Ill Register after two-and-a-half years, and I haven’t come through unscathed. I’m on first-name terms with many of the ambulance crews.

* Martin Crumpton, left, gives a TV interview during
the fight to save  the Cottage Hospital.

"I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to ask our planners to hang fire on the old hospital until the problems of the new health centre are resolved, do you? I really don’t want to get maudlin, but I wondered at the time of the crash on the A5 right below my cottage a few weeks ago if there might have been a better outcome if the cottage hospital just cross the river had still been operational before the airlift to Stoke.

"Somehow, happening so close to me, I felt involved and saddened. Even while the emergency services were arriving at such incredibly short times, I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if there’d been a blockage at the single-file section due to accident, breakdown or congestion, and silently cursed the maniac behind this proposal.

 

"Then, of course, I couldn’t help reflect on the number of times the emergency services had made the difference between life and death, not just for me but my wife as well when she lay bleeding for over an hour after a fall before we discovered her. Frankly, it scares me. Now I’m wheelchair-bound I couldn’t get her to A&E by myself, as I did when she broke her wrist during the icy winter a couple of years ago.

 

"I think what really makes me livid is the thought that heart attack and stroke victims could be kept waiting in a queue because there’s no hospital close enough or because the route to the Maelor is blocked by a queue.

 

Please, right now, write now and register your objections, your fears and your own experiences. It has to be today."