Masons give Fleetwood Hospital an injection of help
   
Craft lodge, Wyre Lodge No 7704, which meets at Fleetwood Masonic Hall on the town’s Esplanade, gave Fleetwood Hospital a welcome booster shot when they presented the hospital with a Roche Coaguchek blood monitoring system.
 
Fleetwood Masons had been following the exploits of one of their Cleveleys colleagues Peter Clay who is in the chair of Cleveleys Park Lodge No 7540, also a Craft lodge. Peter recently underwent two cardiovascular procedures at Blackpool Victoria Hospital.
Peter Clay presents Sean O’ Brian with Wyre Lodge’s gift of a Coaguchek system.
 
During the follow up treatment to monitor his progress Peter discovered that the cardiac unit was in short supply of Coaguchek machines to test the blood of an average of 100 patients daily. As the rate of checking takes around six to eight minutes waiting times can often be quite lengthy.
 
He resolved to do what he could to improve the situation not only to say thank you for the life changing treatment he had received but also to help other patients. He made an appeal to fellow Masons who meet at Fleetwood and Cleveleys asking for their help to purchase another machine which costs £500.
 
Peter’s Mark Master Mason colleagues came up trumps and Peter received funding from PrGM Peter Connolly at the launch of the defibrillator scheme at Cleveleys to purchase a Coaguchek machine outright for BVH. Peter also received a cheque for £300 for the Lymphoedema Clinic at Trinity Hospice from West Lancashire Mark Masons.
 
Not to be outdone by the excellent example set by Mark Masons, and prompted by it, his fellow Craft Masons at Wyre Lodge offered to fund another machine for Fleetwood Hospital.
 
As a result, on behalf of Wyre Lodge, Peter visited Fleetwood Hospital to meet up with the unit’s Sean O’Brian, an anticoagulation biomedical scientist at the hospital’s busy anticoagulant clinic.
 
Sean told Peter that Fleetwood Hospital alone sees on average 150 to 200 patients every week. This is part of a Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre-wide service which looks after around 3,000 patients at weekly clinics.
 
Asking Peter to thank Wyre Lodge for their gift Sean said that the Coaguchek machine would be a great boost not only at the clinic but also would help enormously with the hospital’s domiciliary service which sees members of his team visit patients at home.
 

The machine was shown to be in full working order, as Peter can attest, as Sean put the system through its paces with Peter as the first patient to be monitored by it.
Article and Photograph Courtesy of Bob Boal