"care wonderful, disapointed ward will be closed."

I want to share my experience of attending the center for integrative care because the care I have received from them has been wonderful and I’m very disappointed that the ward is going to be closed down.

They are planning on making it an ambulatory care service so that it is only a day clinic and there will no longer be an impatient ward. I went to the Glasgow and Clyde Annual General Meeting and they seemed to very flippantly dismiss this as a problem because it’s such a small service and there are now only seven beds on the ward. But the reason that there are only seven beds on the ward is because of cuts. They went from about 20 beds to 17 and kept cutting them down, I feel like they have eroded it away until it looks like it’s an insignificant service to then get rid of. When you ask people about it they say they are not closing it because they aren’t closing the day clinic and that it won’t make a difference because they don’t deliver care on the ward after 5 anyway. But they do, the nurses look after you all through the night like they would at any hospital and they do an amazing job.

The team that work on the ward are fantastic, and the ward provides such an important service for people with various long term health conditions, they look after people who have anything from cancer to MS. But now people like me who have various health conditions will have to be referred to different departments for help with different conditions, and this care often doesn’t work well because one treatment often has a negative impact on a different health condition because the doctors don’t look at the bigger picture, whereas at the Centre for integrative care it does just that, it gives an integrative, holistic approach to care for the whole person. They care for you inside and out and understand that if you have a long term health condition that your mental health will be affected as a result. Other doctors tend to write out a prescription for you before you’ve finished talking, whereas at the center they listen to everything you say and then write out a prescription to send you.

I think the people closing down the center find it easy because they’ve never had reason to use the service and they have forgotten that modern medicine began with homeopathy. They say they want care to be holistic but they are closing down the one place where it is, it feels like it’s all smoke and mirrors.

I now have to pay a fortune in taxis to get to my hospital appointments. At the new hospital they boast about coming in on time and under budget but they don’t even have air con in there which must make people even more poorly.

When the ward closes they’ll be leaving a lot of people with long term conditions with nowhere to go but to the individual departments. The next nearest place to go to for homeopathic care is bath and obviously no one here can reasonably get there.

I’m at a loss. It feels like it’s just pen pushers and bean counters doing this and I don’t mean that to be horrible because someone has to hold the purse strings, but anyone cans see how much money is wasted in hospitals.