Health chiefs consider closing Bronglais children's ward

officials are to discuss the matter of terminating the operation of the children’s ward at Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth – due to absence of nurses.

At a meeting of the Hywel Dda University health board later this week, it will likely approve a range of cuts, such as patient beds in Tregaron’s hospital and at night turning off minor injuries unit at Prince Philip Hospital in Llanelli.

On the list of the options whereby the financially squeezed health board would like to proceed is the progress report on the Abersytwyth based Bronglais Hospital’s Angharad ward.

The report says: At the moment Angharad Ward is functioning as a 11 bedded direct specialized Paediatric care ward, which includes a four bed PACU, six ward beds for inpatients, and a single ward high dependency stabilisation space.

PACU is a hospital based single specialty facility where infants children and young people with acute illness, injury or other referrals from clinicians through a short message service with no expectation of inpatient admission can be evaluated assessed or investigated observed and treated with the likely hood of being discharged in less than 24 hours.

“Ward care is for children who need treatment for more than 24 hours due to sickness to be discharged and High Dependency Unit (HDU) is thus set to admit children who require close monitoring or even respiration, before being transferred to Pediatric Intensive Care in another ward.”

At the moment, seven days a week, the paediatric assessment and inpatient support comes from the team of paediatric nurses and doctors focusing on children from the Ceredigion, Powys and Gwynedd regions.

However, health board has admitted in the past it has struggled to recruit nurses and two of them will be going for maternity leave.

Thus, more options have been proposed by the board; this is; closing Angharad ward, but retaining four emergency beds.

This, they propose, would be for a duration of six months.

In the recommended option will now be covering 24 hours for the four PACU beds but the report cautions that this may not be possible as they will still need to recruit more nurses and there is, A risk that BGH will not be able to sustain the second nurse commitment which can result to ad hoc overnight closure.

Other possibilities involves restricting itself to running a 12 hour a day service.

If approved, the change would take place from 1 November.

Any child who requires care for more than twenty-four hours will be relocated to Glangwili in Carmarthen.

The report adds: “The clinical and management working consensus is that any model that is recommended to be adopted should include a 24 hour provision at BGH.

“However, the capacity to continue running a 24/7 ward based inpatient service remains significantly challenged and is still an instantly breakable service for want of reliable nursing / workforce solutions.”

Reacting to the report, Ceredigion MS, Elin Jones said: ‘It is very worrying as one is taken aback to learn that inpatient paediatric beds at Bronglais are going to be closed you know for 6 months’.

“That will set actual alarm bells a ringing within a community.

‘Although emergency 24 hour care and most treatments will remain available for children at Bronglais, any care which takes longer than 24 hours will move to Glangwili.’

“That paed centre has moved from Withybush to Glangwili in the past years, and what I will do is to ensure that even though the full pic is passed to me that the full paediatric service will be restored in 6months now with much emphasis to the ease of the nursing staff pressures.”