LAST year’s reorganisation of emergency health services was one of the biggest shocks ever to hit East Lancashire – and its after-effects are still being felt.

Stories of children and elderly people waiting hours to be seen, relatives dying after the long ambulance journey to Blackburn, and continuing campaigns to restore Burnley’s capability to take patients from ambulances have ensured the hospitals have rarely been out of the news.

The last time I visited Blackburn’s emergency department was on changeover day – November 1 2007. Both Burnley and Blackburn hospitals opened new urgent care centres and the emergency departments merged on one huge site at Blackburn.

That day was organised chaos with the two teams doing their best to rub along in the face of a huge upheaval. Since then, many disgruntled patients have contacted me, often very angry at their experiences in the emergency department.

But as I arrived about 9pm on a Friday, the first thing that hit me was just how serene it was. Staff were clearly busy, and there was a greater sense of urgency here than in any other department I had visited – but it was the emergency department, after all.

Fearing I had somehow managed to arrive on the hospital’s quietest-ever night, I took the plunge and asked staff.

Matron John Howles assured me the department was busy – almost every cubicle in the emergency department and urgent care was full – and it was bound to get worse.

He said: “We have the same cycles. On a Friday it tends to be a lot of minor injuries and people with illness, then people who have had drugs or a lot to drink from about 11pm till the early hours, and then a lot of children and elderly people who have fallen ill in the night.

“I have worked in the emergency departments at both Burnley and Blackburn before the changes. They were both very busy departments, but I can honestly say staff are no busier here than they were before.”

The patients I spoke to were happy with their care, while abusive patients were dealt with sensitively and with minimal disruption.

When one patient arrived with police, he was a familiar face to the medical staff, whose motto is to “never turn anyone away”. Mr Howles said: “We have people who turn up with toothache but they haven’t seen their GP about it, and although we can advise them on more appropriate places for treatment, if they want to stay we have to do our best to treat them within the four-hour target.

“It might seem like madness, but we have to treat everyone the same, and the same goes for people with self-inflicted problems like drink and drugs.”

But what would happen in the face of a train crash or terrorist bomb?

Mr Howles said Blackburn’s eight resuscitation and 18 treatment rooms put it on par with St Thomas’s in London, which led the July 7 bomb victims’ treatment.

He said: “Everyone here knows the procedures for those situations. We would be able to bring people in from home, and we have plans in place with other hospitals in the area. We are prepared – there is no question about that.”