CAMPAIGN: East Sussex WRAS and SussexWorld join forces to help fund new hospital

WRAS founder Trevor Weeks spoke about the number of casualties it cares for.

He said: “We are at crisis point now, in fact we are beyond crisis point at the moment.

"It’s an absolute catastrophe what is happening out there at the moment.

"There is no point in us tinkering around the edges anymore, there is no point in trying to raise a few hundreds pounds here and there to set up another pen or a few thousand pounds there to buy a piece of equipment, we need a new hospital.

"We need to get big here and we need to make sure that there’s a permanent facility in East Sussex to deal with the number of casualties.”

Mr Weeks emphasised how important a new site could be.

He added: “If we can’t expand and we can’t get this hospital off the ground then we are going to be seeing casualty, after casualty, after casualty just being euthanised at vet practices because they won’t have anywhere to take them.”

At the moment the centre takes in around 5,000 casualties a year.

Mr Weeks said: “If we could get a new centre off the ground what we would be aiming for is to at least double the number of casualties we can take in.”

The charity founder also spoke about the cost of running the rescue group.

Mr Weeks said at the moment each casualty costs about £72 to treat, on average.

Katey Edmundson, who has been a WRAS volunteer for eight years, also spoke about the importance of a new site.

She said: “That would be fantastic [to open a new site]. It would be really great for us, we might have some outside space and outside space would be really helpful.”

WRAS has also been impacted recently due to avian flu in the region.

Mr Weeks said: “Every other call at the moment is a gull one way or another. Constantly turning around and telling people, ‘sorry, but you are going to have to get that into a local vets,’ it just doesn’t sit easy cause we know they are just going to end up being put to sleep.

“The one thing we have always wanted to be able to achieve is better quarantine and isolation facilities but it would have to be a completely separate building.”

Despite this the charity is trying to attend as many calls as possible.

Mr Weeks said three years ago he was lucky get get four hours of sleep a night.

He added: “We just don’t have the money or the resources without running ourselves into the ground [to attend more calls] and I have already been there, I have done that, I have got the t-shirt and I don’t want to put anyone through that again.”

WRAS currently needs around £150,000 to hit its first target so it can procure land.

On the two groups coming together, Mr Weeks said: “This is delightful to be honest because I never thought we would get a partnership like this, so it’s really encouraging for us to really try and push forward with this now.”

If you would like to donate please visit East Sussex WRAS’ website.