By Michael Barltrop, via email

With regard to your articles concerning the proposed closure of accident and emergency and maternity at St Helier Hospital.

I can speak with some knowledge of how evil that project is since St Helier saved the life of my partner.

Not once but three times and were able to reverse an otherwise terminal condition.

No other hospital in the area could have achieved what they did, since its emergence as a professional recognised centre of excellence.

I lived at the hospital for two months so, therefore, have first-hand experience of the miracles performed by St Helier medical and administration staff every day and night.

The destruction of that hospital’s established lifesaving units and the blind transfer of those responsibilities to an already swamped and near bankrupt St George’s is an act of criminal irresponsibility in my opinion and must inevitably lead to the avoidable deaths of many hundreds of people, sacrified on the altar of political dogma.

For example, it takes between five to 10 minutes for ambulances (based in Carshalton, close to the Bupa nursing home in Mitcham) to transfer emergency patients from Mitcham and Morden to St Helier.

But it takes between 10 and 30 minutes to take those same patients to St George’s via the infinite traffic gridlock of Tooting.

The average waiting times in A&E at St Helier are between zero and three seconds for critical emergencies. The longest we spent in A&E at St George’s was two hours. On a Wednesday night, things are much more lethal on Saturday nights.

It makes no sense to replace an NHS organisation that remains corruption-free with an imported American model that is incapable of being anything else except totally corrupt.

A small number of doctors will indeed become extremely rich under these Cameron/Clegg proposals, but a lot of blood will pay for that. It will also bankrupt St George’s.

And let us not forget that the majority of lives lost as a result of the progressive destruction of St Helier will be women and children – the other name for wives and daughters.


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