On Friday 15 January we learnt of plans to close our home town’s accident and emergency department in Huddersfield. This means that the 163,000 residents in our large town, from Marsden to Kirkburton, Holmfirth to Mirfield, would need to travel elsewhere, most commonly, Halifax following an accident or emergency.
Unable to comprehend how many deaths would be caused with the extra travel in an emergency, I felt so passionately to keep our life-saving A&E department that I got involved in a facebook group, offered my PR expertise to help spread the word further and subsequently became an admin of the group.
Amazingly, our town has joined forces and within 24 hours of going live, the group had reached almost 30,000 members! Join the facebook group here and why not add one of these banners to your profile/cover photo across social media channels too?
Once in the group, voicing your opinion alone is not enough, we need signatures to be taken seriously.
We need 100,000 signatures to make a real impact, giving us a debate in Parliament.
Frustratingly, there are four separate petitions and to make sure our collective voice is heard please sign all four!
These are:
- Set up by our facebook group owner Karl Deitch (2,658 signatures as of 16.1.16 at 4pm)
- Jason McCartney (amount of signatures unknown)
- Barry Sheerman (7,146 signatures as of 16.1.16 at 4pm)
- 138 degrees (1,558 signatures as of 16.1.16 at 4pm)
Collectively this is approximately 12,000 signatures so we need another 78,000 to be taken seriously!
Once you’ve signed all four petitions, please help us spread the word to get even more members and signatures. Invite your friends to the group on facebook, use the hashtags #HandsoffHRI #Huddersfield on Twitter to post your own and share others Tweets and post details in other West Yorkshire-based groups online to help create some noise! The media are already beginning to take note, here are some of the latest articles:
And, if you want to do even more why not submit your questions for the public discussion at Wednesday’s meeting (1.30pm at Briar Court hotel on 20th January) these need to be submitted to susan.holmes2@calderdaleccg.nhs.uk by Monday 18th at 5pm.
Thanks for the support, I hope this has been useful so now over to you to do what you can – in the words of the late, great David Bowie: ‘we can be heroes, just for one day’.
