J Fish

27 September 2007

There I was, driving home from work, when I turned on the radio and caught an interview with the new Stormont minister for Health, Michael McGimpsey of the Unionist Party.  I didn’t get the start of the interview so I was struggling for quite a few moments to get what the conversation was about.  It also appeared to me that I was actually listening to the minister for Sandy Row, which is in the middle of the minister’s constituency, since this appeared to be the centre of his concerns.

I was able to work out that McGimpsey had just saved the accident and emergency department of the Belfast City Hospital, which is close to Sandy Row, from closure and that he didn’t appear to want to deny that this decision had been taken solely on the basis that the hospital served his constituency.  In fact when he had this charge put to him point blank by the interviewer he appeared to want to confirm it, before giving a rambling answer that concluded with some perfunctory denial of the accusation.

The A & E department at the City couldn’t be allowed to close, he said, because it served 100 people a day from Sandy Row (how did he know where they came from?) and this meant that 150,000 people a year used it.  He wasn’t into cuts he said, he was into efficiencies.  How he will tell the difference I don’t know since 100 people attending a day amounts to 36,500 a year, not 150,000 – his sums only out by 400%!

When it was pointed out that rural listeners might want to object to their local A & E department closing while the City was kept open he prattled on about how good the ambulance service was and about the golden hour in which patients’ recovery is critically determined by reaching a hospital within one hour.  I’m not sure what the point was about this comment and he didn’t explain either but he was adamant that Sandy Row needed its A & E department and he was going to protect it.

There is perhaps only one blot on this otherwise excellent decision to defend local health services, although it is quite an important one – no one was trying to close the A & E department in the City Hospital in the first place.  It was an old proposal put back on the shelf that the minister took off the shelf so he could put it back.

Still isn’t it wonderful that we now have local ministers protecting us?  Maybe he’ll protect the couple of thousand jobs in the Health Service under threat from the Review of Public Administration.  What do you think?