Doctor’s fears for the future following Daisy Hill decision

​Dr Tayo Idowu, who is Chair of the Newry & District GP Federation, told the Newry Reporter that the general opinion of his colleagues is that losing surgical services from Daisy Hill would be “terrible”.

"It's going to impact on a number of levels,” said Dr Idowu, who was speaking on an individual basis.

"Emergency services will then have to take patients from this region, including the likes of Crossmaglen, Kilkeel, those types of places, to try and get to Craigavon.

"Whatever way you look at it, roads are not built to get to Craigavon quickly, even if you are blue-lighting someone. If someone is a surgical emergency, that's going to impact on the time it takes for them to get care.”

He added that as far as local doctors were concerned, Craigavon Hospital has not been set up properly to receive extra patients.

bottleneck

"Everything generally has to go by A&E. GPs have no direct pathway to the surgeons, so all of this is going to bottleneck in A&E anyway,” said Dr Idowu.

"We already know that Craigavon can't cope with the current patient load that it has and so adding in another set of patients, the surgical patients, that means they are going to be waiting in ambulances or in corridors, waiting for the surgeon to come to A&E to then assess them; which isn't ideal.

"So we don't really know the plan for that, and in terms of the referral pathway, that actually hasn't been changed.

"That's going to result in poorer care, and patients potentially coming to harm, perhaps the severity of their illness getting worse, just being left in pain.

"It's going to cause a lot more stress on the staff,” he added.

Dr Idowu also feared that by removing the service from what is a teaching hospital, it could mean that trainees would have to be removed as they won't be able to get their surgical experience.

"Acute cases, the people that present with appendicitis for example, aren’t going to be at Daisy Hill any more.

"It's affecting your ability to train more doctors up, and get more doctors to come back to Daisy Hill and Newry.

"If you can show people 'this is a nice place to be' then they might think, 'actually yes, I want to go and live there or I want to work there.' And if you remove that aspect they're not going to want to do that and they're going to want to be in Belfast, which we're seeing already.

"You then decimate the actual training programme for GP trainees and surgical trainees.”

Cuts are being made “in the wrong places,” according to Dr Idowu.

"I think their current pathway is going to be very damaging in the short and medium term and there's going to be a lot of harm before there's any good from it,” he said.

"Whoever is in charge of health or making these decisions needs really to be lobbying the politicians to go back and start working to help all of the community... the greater good of actual patient care needs to be considered.

"The direction that has been taken is disastrous and is going to result in services becoming private, which might be the way they want it to do - and a two-tier health system. The beginning of the end, really, is how you would see it.”

Read the Southern Trust’s statement in full, along with political reaction to the decision, on our new website: newryreporter.com