Support local NHS hospitals

Written by Duncan Hames and published in Letter to the editor of the Wiltshire Times on Tue 29th Jun 2004

Dear Sir,

In his column in your paper last week, Westbury's MP and Conservative Health Spokesman said that he doesn't "much mind who delivers health-care so long as it is free at the point of delivery". How different to the views of the hundreds of people in Warminster campaigning to save the local community hospital on your front page! Clearly they, like most people, want quality health-care close to home. In Warminster and across West Wiltshire that means more support and money for local NHS hospitals.

His policy: using taxpayers money, earmarked for the NHS, to make going private cheaper for those people rich enough to afford to pay half the cost of these expensive operations, will not help in that aim. If NHS funds are given to places like the Bath Clinic to perform the simplest and least risky operations it will only further undermine the ability of our already troubled local NHS to support our community hospitals in places like Warminster.

Instead of his fashionable agnosticism about the NHS, the MP would do better to use his new position to advocate a health-care policy that would improve health-care for all people in rural areas like West Wiltshire rather than one designed for people in London with many large hospitals to choose from.

Faithfully,

Cllr Duncan Hames