PLEASE keep your letters to 250 words maximum giving your name, address and daytime telephone number - even on emails. Email: letters@wiltshiretimes.co.uk. Write: Wiltshire Times, 15 Duke Street, Trowbridge, BA14 8EF. Phone: 01225 773600.

Anonymity is granted only at the discretion of the editor, who also reserves the right to edit letters.

A wave is enough

I WOULD like to alert car owners to the misguided practice of using their lights to say thank you to a fellow car driver who has stopped to allow them through a one-way system.

The intensity of modern car lights is enough to blind drivers of another vehicle but a line of car drivers, all flashing their lights as they pass through, is a total blinder. Sheer madness.

Night vision is affected for the stationary driver, let alone the damage done to one’s eyes. A raised hand is all that is needed. Please stop this dangerous practice. And can car manufacturers please cease from supplying those dangerous super-bright headlights. Lives are at risk.

Kate Campbin, Springfield, Bradford on Avon

It’s RUH’s own fault

YET another outbreak of Norovirus at the Royal United Hospital, with huge yellow warning signs, shows such major infection outbreaks look set to be an annual event.

The blame for such outbreaks is usually focussed by the RUH on its visitors, yet there is good evidence that the RUH’s history of staff sickness is, in many cases, down to its own unsound practices.

NHS Digital reported in 2018 that nurses at the Royal United Hospitals took 2,987 days off sick the previous year because of infectious diseases.

The failure of the RUH to provide adequate changing and laundry facilities means nursing staff have to wear their uniforms to and from work. Because staff have to pay to park their cars at RUH, public transport is frequently used.

The RUH rules require that health care uniforms are washed separately at 60 degrees. Yet the responsibility for this is offloaded on to its staff. National surveys on this issue are not reassuring. One survey by De Montfort University found only 75 per cent of nurses said they washed their uniforms after every shift. Another study found 44 per cent of nursing staff washed their uniforms below the recommended temperature of 60 degrees.

Older nurses will remember when hospitals did their own laundry of uniforms, but now all laundry is contracted out and for some hospitals like the RUH, uniforms are not part of that contract.

The Textile Service Association has stated: “The inability of domestic washing machines to carry out a validated hygienic wash process....further exacerbates the cross-contamination potential.”

Many countries prohibit the wearing of hospital clothing outside the workplace. They require the health service providers to sterilise and provide clean uniforms for the healthcare workers.

De Montfort University researchers recommended that the washing of hospital uniforms be moved back in-house. Infection control is being compromised to save money.

This is the environment into which healthy women who happen to be heavily pregnant are being expected to enter. The reason why the Trowbridge Birthing Unit was originally closed for two months was to support the Princess Anne Wing staff in Bath which had been heavily depleted by illness.

Surely an acute hospital, designed for seriously ill patients, is not a suitable location for a birthing unit. Being pregnant is neither an illness nor a disease.

Community birthing units are more cost effective and according to NHS research only 36 per cent of first-time low-risk mothers require transfer to hospital for medical support, and just nine per cent of low-risk second or subsequent births need such a transfer. Centralising such care in hospitals is expensive, frequently unnecessary and can place a healthy mother and her baby at risk of infection.

Sam Selman, Church Avenue, Melksham

Truant or triumph?

I WONDER what criteria Dr Brian Mathew uses when deciding whether or not to endorse students going on strike. Is it their depth of ‘passion’? Or is it the extent to which their politics mirror his own?

I assume that he would regard students striking from school in order to pursue Brexit, for example, as truants, however ‘passionate’ they might be about their cause.

Ruth Kinderman, Smithy Lane, Woodborough

Not in his control

I HAVE been following your Letters page and the efforts by Jonathon Seed to encourage the Police and Crime Commissioner in elation to the deployment of the additional 41 officers as a result of the council tax increase.

The point that Councillor Seed appears to miss is that it is not within the remit of the PCC to deploy operational staff, or indeed make any operational decisions - that is the job of the Chief Constable. The role of the PCC is to appoint the CC, hold the CC to account and basically ‘count the beans’ so that sufficient funds are available to run the constabulary.

Whilst Councillor Seed may not have grasped that, neither have a great many PCC’s throughout the country.

George Murray, Waylenfield, Tilshead

Action needed now

THE Government is not alerting us to the scale of the impacts from climate change that will increasingly be forcing disruptive changes on our lives. Only with this knowledge will there be enough general public support to make the large-scale changes necessary to help protect things for the younger generation. They are making their voices heard increasingly around the globe as they wake up to the urgency about the threats to their future.

The media also has a responsibility to help share the truth of what is facing us: what David Attenborough called “a man-made disaster of global scale. Our greatest threat in thousands of years … If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

In my small town, Marlborough, I have started, and plan to continue, to use different ways to help people understand what we are facing, and hope that they will then demand action. I placed a Climate Crisis banner on our Town Hall last week and today, have stuck leaflets around the High Street. Others can do likewise, across our county.

Jo Ripley, Hyde Lane, Marlborough

Who’s your Hero?

LAST year, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) hosted its first ever national Heart Hero Awards.

This ceremony was a fantastic and emotional night which celebrated winners and nominees from different walks of life and from every part of the UK. They ranged from inspirational children to remarkable fundraisers and heroic individuals who stepped up to save the life of a stranger using CPR. Each winner and nominee shared a spirit that embodies all that is best about the UK.

We know there are many more unsung Heart Heroes out there and we want to shine a light on their selfless achievements. This will help the BHF raise awareness of the need for continued funding to bring new hope to the seven million people in the UK who are living with conditions such as stroke, coronary heart disease, vascular dementia and diabetes.

That’s why we are calling on your readers to make a valuable nomination for the Heart Hero Awards 2019.

A Heart Hero can be anyone from a nurse or doctor working in the field of heart disease to a young person with heart disease who has shown incredible courage and determination.

Those shortlisted will be invited to a glitzy awards ceremony in London on September 20, when the winners will be announced.

There are three categories open for public nominations: My Healthcare Hero, Inspirational Heart Hero and the Mark Lynn Young Heart Hero Award (under 18).

To find out more about the categories or to make a nomination, visit www.bhf.org.uk/heartheroes

Entries close at 4pm on Friday, March 1 – we wish everyone the best of luck.

Simon Gillespie, Chief Executive, British Heart Foundation

Save those stamps

THE Bone Cancer Research Trust is the leading charity dedicated to fighting primary bone cancer and they need your help. Please save your new and used stamps for their Stamp Appeal.

They can turn your stamps into funds, so they can continue with their life-saving research, providing reliable information, raising crucial awareness as well as offering support to those who need it.

Find out more at www.bcrt.org.uk/stamps and send your stamps to:

BCRT Stamp Appeal, 20 Bowers Road, Benfleet, Essex, SS7 5PZ

Challenge to council

ON February 16 there was a peaceful protest as the parents from Larkrise School, Trowbridge walked with their profoundly and multiply handicapped children to County Hall to protest at plans to close their school.

A similar protest by the parents and children of St Nicholas’ School was featured on your front page. Both sets of parents, in Chippenham and Trowbridge, have massive community support.

I have just finished reading Wiltshire Council’s special schools cabinet paper, published on November 27, 2018. Appendix 2, Section 3 states: “The consultation showed 71 per cent (of members of the public consulted) preferred the three-school option... only 12 per cent of respondents thought that the (first) option to create one school ... was the most suitable.”

So why proceed with the option seen as the least suitable? Protest by the general public as well as by parents would be – and has been – inevitable.

Again one single school at Rowde raises major transport issues. Some parents have calculated that their children will spend more time on school transport than in school.

Yet Appendix 8 states: “A significant advantage of Rowde is not having to arrive via busy rush hour town traffic.”

Where is the logic? Children will already have been through the rush hour of their local town: the journey to Rowde will be an addition with the extra cars and coaches along a pot-holed road with a series of multiple bends and ‘slow’ signs.

I note the council’s journey times in this document have been calculated by the AA route planner. So no-one from Wiltshire Council has attempted the real journeys in real time.

I suggest the councillors who voted for the ill-conceived and unpopular ‘one school option’ try some of these journeys for themselves.

Margaret Jensen, Greenway Gardens, Chippenham

Time for a new vote

MAY I take this opportunity to point out to your correspondent Mark Griffiths that there is no definition of a Great Country which includes complacency, misplaced nostalgia and a disconnect from reality. The apparently hated EU gives UK manufacturers and service providers access to a market of 500 million people on the doorstep together with the right to trade in it. To say this could be replaced with trade with unspecified Commonwealth countries is to deny both economics and geography.

At no point during the Referendum campaign did Leave campaigners address the issues of inward investment to provide sustainable employment, the importance of frictionless supply chains, the reduction of the UK’s standing on the world stage and the backward step of reintroducing a hard border on the island of Ireland in contravention of the Good Friday agreement.

Before the UK does any more damage to itself surely the time has come to compare what can be achieved by leaving the EU with what was promised by the Brexiteers, review the economic and constitutional effect on the UK of leaving, especially if there is no deal and put the whole matter back to a People’s Vote. With luck the debate leading up to it could be conducted on rational grounds without demonising the EU, without platitudes and simplistic slogans and without any further attempts to take the UK back to some mythical past.

CNA Williams, Clipsham Rise, Trowbridge

Let’s all support UK

PROMINENT campaigners for Brexit include James Dyson, Jacob Rees-Mogg (both with local connections) and Britain’s richest person, Jim Ratcliffe.

Dyson, it must be said, has created many jobs in Wiltshire over the years. However, a few years ago he moved his manufacturing to Malaysia. More recently he has decided to move his head office to Singapore.

Rees-Mogg, a multi-millionaire, heads up Somerset Capital Management which has subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and Singapore, both offshore tax havens. Britain’s most wealthy individual, Jim Ratcliffe, is relocating to Monaco in order to avoid the payment of up to £4 billion in annual tax.

In all three cases, this is money which would have funded our cash-strapped public services, including the NHS.

It seems that supporting Brexit and supporting the UK do not go together.

Roger Jones, Regents Place, Bradford on Avon