We discovered a week ago that SaTH, the organisation running the Royal Shrewsbury and Princess Royal Hospitals, had firm plans to close one of the A&Es soon. We’d suspected this for a while. One of the SaTH Directors saying they could close an A&E ‘within weeks or months’ was a bit of a give-away!
At the weekend, though, we found out just how immediate the threat was. We were approached by someone who has to remain anonymous, but who had very good information on what was happening in the hospitals. This person told us that a decision had been taken to close one of the A&Es as part of ‘winter pressures planning’. It seems completely perverse to close an A&E department at the start of the winter, and this ‘quick and dirty’ approach would have caused absolute chaos for patients seeking emergency care – but it really does seem certain that this is what hospital bosses had decided to do. A disgraceful, disgraceful decision.