{"id":695974,"date":"2026-01-14T18:54:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T18:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/695974\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T18:54:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T18:54:10","slug":"fermanagh-swah-services-group-say-it-will-bring-campaign-to-stormont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/695974\/","title":{"rendered":"Fermanagh: Swah services group say it will bring campaign to Stormont"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Eileen McGovern, a member of SOAS, said returning &#8220;life-saving&#8221; emergency general surgery services to Swah was not a lost cause.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We need this service, it&#8217;s life-saving, it&#8217;s crucial and it&#8217;s a right,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I&#8217;m already 45 minutes from the hospital, you then try driving a critically ill patient in the back of the car when there&#8217;s no ambulance available&#8230; it is unacceptable.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The people who are making these decisions do not live in Fermanagh, that is the very crucial point.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The campaign group has recently taken a legal challenge against the Western Trust over the suspension of emergency general surgery at the hospital.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It follows comments made by the Western Trust board at a Stormont health committee briefing last November that when a service was paused there was an &#8220;inevitability&#8221; it won&#8217;t go back.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A Western Trust spokesperson said the comment referred to the trust being unable to go back to the emergency general service provided at Swah in 2022.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However since then, the trust has complied with standards set for emergency general surgery at Altnagelvin Hospital which covers the entire Western Trust area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eileen McGovern, a member of SOAS, said returning &#8220;life-saving&#8221; emergency general surgery services to Swah was not a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4316],"tags":[105,4348,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-695974","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115894974092478236","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}