Your views on health care: plans and priorities for the county

First the magistrates' courts were shut, in part because of Chippenham's new court, then the Record Office is relegated to the totally unsuitable Cocklebury Road site in Chippenham.

Now we have the North Wiltshire/Kennet and West Wiltshire PCT decimating our hospitals to benefit north Wiltshire.

Bradford on Avon, Devizes, Trowbridge, Warminster and Westbury Hospitals close. Devizes and Trowbridge Health Clinics close. Asset stripping on a gigantic scale, ripping the hearts out of a network of communities!

But surprise, surprise Chippenham and Malmesbury Hospitals don't close, and indeed Chippenham gets a New Generation Hospital AS WELL!

Yet unlike the west Wiltshire and Kennet towns, Chippenham is neatly located between Bath's Royal United and Swindon's Great Western Hospitals with a speedy M4 connection to both!

Central Wiltshire looks set to become Deadman's Gulch, its residents condemned to a second class health service and a shorter life expectancy.

Where is the level playing field? What sort of figures and information are the PCTs working with?

West Wiltshire, particularly Trowbridge and Westbury, are set for substantial growth, Trowbridge community area surpassing that of Chippenham.

D.M. COLCOMB.

Roundway Park, Devizes.

• I READ with incomprehension the proposals regarding health provision in west and north Wiltshire. These recommendations made by the West Wiltshire and North Wiltshire PCTs can only be described as blatantly partial and unfair.

I understand and indeed support the underlying principles of moving towards prevention and maintaining good health rather than treating illness, and the concept of the primary care centres with more services delivered locally. However it is the provision of beds that is the worry.

There will always be the need for nursing care for very often the most vulnerable members of our society, especially the elderly and of course for maternity beds.

Where are these beds for west Wilts and more particularly Trowbridge?

Under proposal 1 there do not appear to be any. Under proposals 2 and 3 there could be some in Melksham.

However they would increase those in north Wiltshire. Chippenham and Malmesbury, retain their hospitals and Chippenham also will be the site of a brand new large health centre which would include the only maternity unit in the area.

I thought that these days joined up thinking' is required. Surely when deciding where to place beds account should be taken of population, transport links and indices of deprivation. Trowbridge scores highly under all of these.

Public transport to Chippenham from west Wiltshire is abysmal compared with the excellent links to Trowbridge. The population of the Trowbridge Community Area is set to surpass that of Chippenham and as regards areas of deprivation, which sadly include poor health, again Trowbridge has one of the most deprived wards in Wiltshire The access to hospital and major health care facilities in north Wiltshire will be far superior to that of west Wiltshire, whose inhabitants will be condemned to a second class service.

These recommendations MUST be vigorously and vehemently contested at the highest level. We need as many people and local organisations as possible to write complaining about this invidious situation.

The address is: Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt MP, Secretary of State for Health, The Department of Health, Richmond House, 79 Whitehall, London SW1A 2NS dhmail@dh.gsi.gov.uk.

A MILROY.

Member representing Trowbridge Community Area Future on the Board of the West Wilts Local Strategic Partnership.

Trowbridge.

• FROM the cradle to the grave was the slogan under which the NHS was formed in 1948, a phrase which could well describe the provision of care at Trowbridge Hospital since it was opened in 1929 and earlier in the Trowbridge cottage hospitals.

To the grave I have had a parent, grandparents and other relations who have ended their days in Trowbridge Hospital. In all areas the care and attention of the staff has remained constant whether it is as an in-patient, a casualty or an out-patient so why should this service come to an end?

The alternate provision proposed seems to me at the best second rate, one proposal is to provide a 24-hour emergency service in a surgery and would this have the facilities of the present unit? If this is not the case then it would mean a trip to the RUH for all minor casualties, which is already over stretched and only this week announced the loss of 300 jobs.

Another proposal is the provision of a 50-bed unit in Chippenham, 50 beds for the whole of the area! The NHS spokesperson seemed to think that would just be a short trip up the road for the elderly?

Why should the county town lose its hospital to an inadequate one in Chippenham have we not been here before with the record office debate?

Once again the county town is in danger of losing a major facility. Where are mothers to receive ante-natal provision? Where are babies to be born? Where are the elderly to die? The RUH policy seems to be to send them back to Trowbridge. If, or should it be when, these ideas are adopted there will be no hospital in the whole of the west Wiltshire area.

The fight is on, we cannot afford to lose Trowbridge Hospital.

A JONES.

Trowbridge.

• NOBODY would dispute that health care isn't an important issue and with the decline in the health service over the last few years I would normally welcome reading about improvements instead of stories about the fights to keep all the local hospitals open.

However after reading about the proposed extension to Adcroft Surgery I just couldn't believe what I was reading, they want to dig up the only youth cricket pitch in Trowbridge and turn it mainly into a car park.

For the last few years Trowbridge Cricket Youth has been re-established and membership is growing all the time, with teams from Under 9s to Under 15s competing in the local league and guess where they play their matches? There are also the boys that are making the transition to adult cricket by playing in the 3rd and 4th teams and guess where they play their matches? Their matches are all played on this pitch that they want to turn into a car park.

In the summer the pitch is used for youth cricket and in the winter for youth football. The pitches are maintained to the highest standard, and one of the best assets to this ground is that the youth managers don't have to start the matches by shovelling up the dog excrement before they can play.

There are changing facilities and a clubhouse, nowhere else in Trowbridge can offer this. Somebody mentioned in a letter last week that they could play at Seymour or The Stallards playing fields, obviously this person doesn't realise that there are no changing rooms at either venue and they are both totally unsuitable for cricket. It is such a shame that once again sports facilities are being threatened, Trowbridge is supposed to be the county town and yet surrounding villages have better sports facilities.

You read all the time about kids not being fit any more and spending too much time on the PlayStation, well very soon if they want to play sport in Trowbridge the PlayStation may be the only option.

C GILES.

Trowbridge.

• IT was with great dismay and anger that I read Pathways For Change, the consultation document published by our local Primary Care Trust. All three options for consultation include the loss of Trowbridge Hospital and its maternity unit, and do not represent, in any shape or form, the level of community health care required by our county town.

The loss of all hospital beds will cause acute distress to thousands of families and can only result in a dramatic downturn in physical and social wellbeing. Furthermore, whilst I welcome the advent of preventative care being promoted by the PCT, this will provide little balm to those forced to endure regular travel to Bath RUH or Chippenham.

However, the trauma will not stop there. Firstly, the PCT has signalled the active promotion of home births. While I am very much in favour of accommodating this option when requested by parents, to actively promote home births as the result of fiscal mismanagement is nothing short of scandalous. Secondly, to rob the county town of sporting facilities by usurping the site of the cricket ground to achieve its new build plan is entirely counter to health promotion.

We have suffered enough. Lack of government funding coupled with myopia on the part of the PCT has lead to this ultimate betrayal and once again we find our county town is being asset stripped.

People of Trowbridge, don't dare fall ill, the PCT is about to administer a fatal dose. If they were a doctor they would be struck off.

CLLR A BRYANT.

Lib Dem, Park Ward.

Trowbridge.

• THE decision by the Kennet and West Wiltshire PCT to close hospitals in Trowbridge, Warminster, Devizes and in all probability Melksham represents nothing less than the dismantling of comprehensive NHS care in Wiltshire.

Patients who once would have been treated in hospital will now be trapped at home, over-reliant on overstretched community teams, friends and relatives or inappropriately placed in private nursing homes. Furthermore, much of their care at home will be defined as personal care which will mean that under government policy they will have to pay for treatment.

Moreover there will be enormous pressure on hospital medical staff to prematurely discharge patients into the community in order to free up beds. In fact, this trend will be re-enforced by the government's rapid move towards the establishment of a privatised health care market, which will make it imperative for hospitals to quickly discharge patients in order to cut costs and make a profit.

These proposals will also have a devastating impact upon NHS staff, with perhaps as many as 300-400 jobs lost, representing a massive waste of skills and experience.

UNISON locally is determined to resist these savage cuts and we hope local people will join together to defend what is, after all, their NHS hospitals and services.

R DAVEY.

UNISON Senior Steward.

Swindon and Wiltshire Health Care Branch