CLLR Vikki Slade’s and your scaremongering at the Echo sadden me when I read the front-page headlines ‘More people will die’ in Tuesday’s edition.

If you read the proposals carefully, you will see that there is no proposal to close Poole A&E during the day – only at night.

Poole A&E will continue to have a consultant lead service for 12 hours a day (and Dorset County Hospital will have a consultant lead service for 14 hours a day, as it does at present).

In all probability, at night time, people will be able to get to the Royal Bournemouth Hospital more quickly than they can get to Poole in the daytime, especially in the holiday season.

Therefore, I do not think that travelling times will put patients at greater risk than they are already.

What does put patients at risk is taking them to an A&E that is not properly staffed and by far the greatest risk in the NHS is the lack of sustainability in terms of workforce.

Successive Governments have failed to train enough nurses and doctors, so even when we have the funds, it is very difficult to recruit clinicians and retain them.

A&E is a speciality that has great difficulty in recruitment and who can blame the clinicians, when increasingly, the patients they have to treat are there because of drunkenness.

Consolidating night time A&E in one place is partly the outcome of a serious shortage of doctors and nurses.

In addition, to gain expertise in complicated A&E cases it is necessary to have a large population from which to draw otherwise, the doctors do not get enough experience in what they do.

A question I always ask is: “Would you prefer to have a procedure carried out down the road by someone who only performs it 10 times a year or would you rather travel a little bit further and have someone who carries out the procedure 150 times a year”. Practice makes perfect!

SCOTTIE GREGORY

Mount Pleasant Drive, Bransgore

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