THE recent NHS consultation about Forest hospitals was nothing to do with the state of the Dilke or Lydney hospital, it was all to do with cutting the number of hospital beds.   

It is all part of a national plan to reduce hospital bed numbers and treat people in their own homes or to provide services to prevent them needing hospital care.   

So all the waffle in the consultation documents was designed to throw people off the scent.   

They rubbished our hospitals without giving any proof and said the only “viable” option was a new hospital to be built somewhere to upset the most number of people.   

They said the number of beds would be a minimum of 24 which is half the existing number.   

What they didn’t say was they had performed this trick all over Gloucestershire, replacing much-loved local hospitals with smaller, new hospitals, resulting in a net reduction of 132 community beds since 2010.   

Now, Simon Stevens, who is the head of the NHS in England, has said that these bed reductions shouldn’t happen until there are better alternatives in place for patients.   

I am not convinced that this is the case and the NHS didn’t even mention it in the consultation document.   

We have a crisis locally and nationally in the NHS which is made worse by the cutting of beds – 15,000 nationally since 2010 – and this planned cut in the Forest will only add, in a small way, to this chaos.   

The NHS representatives will be deciding on January 25 whether to accept the will of the majority that took part in the consultation or to ignore them and to go ahead to cut more beds.   

They should ask themselves whether this would be in the interests of future patients.

– Peter Stanway, Popes Hill.