THE chairman of a Banbury-based hospital campaign group has spoken out after an agonising 19-hour wait for surgery at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

Keith Strangwood, 56, leads Keep the Horton General, which last year fought against the removal of emergency surgery from Banbury’s Horton Hospital.

Now he fears surgical procedures at Oxford’s hospitals are similarly in dire straits.

At 11am on Wednesday, May 13, Mr Strangwood visited his local GP, Horsefair Surgery, with stomach pains and was instructed to go to the John Radcliffe with a suspected strangulated hernia. He arrived at 12.15pm and was in a hospital bed waiting to be treated by 1.30pm. He said: “I was told the soonest they could do it was 7pm. At 10 o’clock, the surgeon came in and said ‘I can’t say for definite whether or not we will do it tonight’.

“I hadn’t eaten since 5pm the night before and said I needed to know, or I was going to collapse.”

Eventually Mr Strangwood was informed that there would be no surgery that night due to two trauma cases. He was finally operated on at 9am the next day.

Mr Strangwood said his daughter had called the hospital earlier in the morning and was told that only one operating theatre was in use on the Monday night.

He said: “For a major trauma centre to have one theatre operating is madness.

“We at Keep the Horton General were told that the reasons for removing emergency surgery in Banbury is they have got to go to the centre in the John Radcliffe.

“One year later, this happens.”

Oxford University Hospitals Trust said there were “many” operating theatres in the trust’s hospitals, including several dedicated to emergency lists.