"Advised closure of the wound dressing clinic"

I'm a quite frequent flyer of medical centres in general and Dongara Medical Centre in particular as I suffer from oedema and tend to get cellulitis quite often as a result which due to my osteoarthritis and inability to self treat requires medical treatment up to 3 times a week for wound dressings on the sores that appear on my lower legs. The normal procedure at the hospital was to have to visit the emergency department three times for treatment before then being referred to the onsite Wound Dressing Clinic for ongoing follow up treatment for sometimes up to 3 months or so.

Now that I have a new recurrence of my cellulitis and the Wound Dressing Clinic has been closed I will have to make months of emergency room treatments instead of going to fixed appointments at the clinic. every single time, up to three times a week, I will have to visit the emergency room, go through mandatory triage including blood pressure, pulse rate observations and a new chart being started with the of the extra time that entails from having to do paperwork. And when you have one single allergy to a medication from 45 years ago they also have to take the extra time to make up a red allergy wristband for me to wear during my dressing. None of this is required in the Wound Dressing Clinic.

I think whoever seemingly decided to cut funding to save some pennies on staffing of the wound care clinic should consider the large extra amount of time taken to go through the triage and treatment process while having to go through the whole A&E process.

Also, as someone else pointed out in their story, having to sometimes wait for hours, like approximately 4 hours recently, up to three times a week is at best an inconvenience and at worst a massive annoyance.

While I was waiting to be triaged recently for my wounds during quite a busy period, with only two nurses on, I recall there was an elderly patient there with a quite severe burn on their wrist who had been waiting quite a while to get a burn treatment. It seemed they ended up having to leave because they had pressing time sensitive matters on their farm they had to get back to and left with some harsh words being spoken to staff and an untreated wound with possible severe infection risks of an open wound on a very non-sterile farm environment.

In my opinion, throwing the Wound Dressing Clinic patients back into the A&E pool of patients puts added stress and workload on the nurses as well as increasing wait times for all other patients, or else the wound dressing patient gets pushed back to the end of the queue as our issues aren't as emergent as almost any other patient arriving in an ambulance.

It seems that closing the Wound Dressing Clinic for cost cutting reasons, in my opinion, is very short sighted and just adds to the nurse's burdens of too many patients as well as building ill will and impatience in the patients who just want a short and sweet several minutes straightforward dressing applied instead of a multi hour wait.

Please apply some common sense and bring back the Wound Dressing Clinic to the Dongara Health Centre.

Thank you for reading my story and please get behind the fight to restore a much needed clinic at the hospital. No photos are included as no one needs to see gory wound photos and everyone has seen dressings covering them.