"While the QE2 isn't perfect at least..."

We're sorry that you felt you had an unduly long wait at the Lister's children's A&E, but once the combined service is located at the Lister then staffing levels can be improved further - rather than being stretched thinly over two hospital sites as they are now. Also by this September, the Lister's new multi-storey car park will open and this will ease parking and access problems to the hospital considerably. Although you had to wait for two hours to be seen, nonetheless this was well within the four-hour maximum wait period set nationally.

On the wider issues of the changes being made to the Lister and QEII, this will see the Lister becoming the main hospital for emergency and inpatient care, with the new QEII hospital being planned becoming a local general hospital. These changes have not been driven by health service managers, but rather by senior doctors and nurses who know that they can make real improvements in the care they provide.

In the case of heart attacks, these changes are already in place - with the Lister now the main receiving hospital for such emergencies. Even with a blocked motorway, a person's chances of surviving are improved dramatically by being taken to the Lister's specialist cardiac catheterisation laboratory where the latest medical technology really does save more lives.

How do we know this? Because the Lister unit has been up and running for two years now and is recognised nationally as having some of the best response and treatment rates anywhere in the NHS. The upshot is that precisely because we have centralised such specialist services, more people who have had a heart attack in our part of Hertfordshire are alive today to tell the tale.