MP CONCERNED OVER HOSPITAL CLOSURE!!
Written by Jay Richards on 03/10/2020
Teignmouth Hospital, which opened in 1954 is now under serious threat of closure. A consultation is running till the end of October making for views on the future of health and care services in the area. People in Teignmouth and Dawlish are being asked what they think about moving services from Teignmouth Community Hospital into a new £8 million wellbeing centre in Teignmouth, abandoning plans to go ahead with 12 new beds that were previously proposed for the hospital that never came to fruition.
IMAGE: Anne Marie Morris, Member of Parliament for Newton Abbot
Jay Richards for Riviera FM spoke with Member of Parliament for Newton Abbot, Anne Marie Morris who said under interview: “I am deeply concerned and deeply frustrated that currently the plan of the local health authority ‘The Clinical Commissioning Group’ so to speak are proposing to close Teignmouth Hospital, and for me this is ‘closure by stealth!?’”.
The MP went on to say: “we started out some years ago now, when there was a consultation to change the existing beds into rehab beds, and then the rehab beds mysteriously never appeared, and then it appeared that they could manage without them!!”. “Now the proposal is a new hub which I support, in which the GP Practices and Social Services as well the voluntary sector will be united. Fabulous, but the proposals in terms of where the other services used to be provided by Teignmouth Hospital and where they are going is not in my view a case well made!”, “It’s of real concern to me that we are removing a hospital when we haven’t worked out how we’re going to deal with this parallel working of Covid and non-Covid, because it’s not as simple as a Nightingale Hospital!”
“I’m also concerned that the number of nursing homes has fallen dramatically in the area and in Teignmouth there are now ‘none!’, in Dawlish there are two, and there are none in Newton Abbot! Without this as a resource and as we know there is a shortage of domiciliary care provision, how can we sensibly close that Hospital?”.
MP Anne Marie Morris is a British Conservative Party politician and former lawyer. She has been the Member of Parliament for Newton Abbot since 2010.
