UNITE members support campaign to save emergency services at local hospital in Enniskillen

 Unpublished article from last year. 

Unite members in Fermanagh, a largely rural county in the south-west of Northern Ireland, have passionately supported a campaign to prevent emergency surgical services at their local hospital in Enniskillen being moved over 60 miles away to Derry.

£5,000 has been donated by the Enniskillen Unite branch to help pay for the publicity materials that has been distributed widely. Activists including bus driver rep John McMahon, branch secretary Derek Parton and Sean Rodgers at Liberty Insurance have been at the forefront of the drive for better health care. This work has also encouraged previously non- union members to join UNITE.

Campaigners believe the proposed cuts would impact badly on patient care and could lead to the eventual closure of the hospital, which Unite activists have long argued has been neglected by politicians in Westminster, Belfast and Dublin. Reconstructed in 2012, the South West Acute Hospital (SWAH) is the only public-private finance initiative facility in Northern Ireland.

SWAH is managed by Western Health and Social Care who Jim Quinn, a TGWU/Unite member for 47 years, points out “from the start only ever used three of the five theatres. They would have preferred to force people to travel on poor roads to obtain care at Derry’s Altnaglevin Hospital.”

Large rallies and public meetings over the last three years have forced Northern Ireland’s Health Minister Mike Nesbitt to put on hold till after the summer a proposed consultation exercise that is ultimately designed to close Enniskillen’s emergency surgical services. This would force seriously ill patients to travel to Derry.  Avoidable deaths seem certain. The change of attitude came immediately after the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) passed an emergency resolution at a meeting in Belfast backing hospital campaigners.

“We suffer from being in the south-west of Northern Ireland as we are the furthest County from both Belfast, London and Dublin. Consequently, we don’t even have a railway service,” states locally born Jim, who following his successful book Labouring Alongside Lough Erne: A Study of the Fermanagh Labour Movement, 1826-1932, is currently writing volume 2 on the period up until 1978.

Nesbitt’s pause is allowing campaigners’ time to refocus their efforts. They ultimately hope to pressurise the health authorities, which a few years back failed in their attempts to close the stroke and the neo-natal services, into providing a more comprehensive range of services that people require.  

“The local political reps of all the main parties are supportive of improving patient care,” states Jim and which “which could be made more viable by boosting economies of scale by getting the hospital to serve cross border communities in the south and north.”

To buy Labouring Alongside Lough Erne go to:- https://www.connollybooks.org/product/labouring-beside-lough-erne