Any regular reader of the WWN will have noticed that stories about the continuing closure of the inpatient ward of our town’s hospital have seldom been far from its pages over the past few months.

And last Wednesday’s May 29 edition bore this out in two separate pieces, following a statement issued to Wellington Town Council this week by Lucy Nicholls, on behalf of our local NHS trust. She hopes the town hospital will re-open in September 2019 as planned but her announcement was greeted with scepticism by many on the council.

And this is hardly surprising, given how cash-strapped our whole NHS is, due to the current Conservative government’s short-sighted austerity measures which are inevitably leading to staff shortages, both here in Wellington and in 140,000 unfilled posts nationwide.

Indeed Chard hospital faces a similar closure. There is a train of thought that with an ever-increasing trend towards centralisation of healthcare services, we may be seeing a situation where smaller, local hospitals are being gradually ‘edited out of the picture’ in favour of larger neighbouring establishments.

Sufficient funding for our local Wellington Community Hospital may well be facing competition from a new stroke rehabilitation facility being planned for Somerset.

And in a perfect world, of course, we shouldn’t need to prioritise in this way. Clearly the stroke centre is very much needed but we the public shouldn’t be asked to choose one important healthcare facility at the expense – literally – of the other.

To this end, the Lib Dems have long been advocating a minimal 1p in the £1 hike on income tax to pay for our NHS which many of us, including myself, would be only too pleased to see happen, particularly in view of a steeply ageing population in the coming years, whose needs are set to increase, rather than do the opposite.

Cllr Mark Lithgow

Highpath, Wellington