HANDLED throughout in a disrespectful, shabby and shamelessly unprofessional fashion, the NHS’s decision to withdraw funding from Okehampton’s hospital-based GP surgery has not been well received, certainly not by its own registered patients, nor by those dependant on the reportedly already overwhelmed Oke-hampton Medical Centre, where they face the prospect of vying for medical attention alongside an additional 1,750 people.

On Friday evening, a representative of NHS England South West faced some very trenchant questioning on this highly contentious issue from the floor of a packed Charter Hall. How would they defend the indefensible? Justify the unjustifiable? It seems they can’t!

Our NHS spokesperson made a number of quite extraordinary and, frankly, outrageous statements, not least among which was that their decision was ‘irreversible’. Nonsense — every decision is reversible and must, when so patently and manifestly unsafe, be reversed.

‘The money follows the patient’— so, no savings to be made then; certainly not enough to justify the raised blood pressure and enhanced stress levels of some 1,750 of your customers to the point at which their very health and wellbeing is placed at unnecessary risk.

Every ‘small’ (ergo rural village) GP practice is to be subject to the same strategy’. So, watch out all you country-dwellers, your local surgery faces the real danger of having its NHS funding similarly withdrawn — you will not be consulted, neither you nor your welfare will be considered —it will close.

I could go on but no doubt many more contributors, all far more articulate than my humble self and having greater claim on your valuable space, will be building an irrefutable case against this decision, which is at best morally corrupt and at worst legally questionable.

BH Varrall

Okehampton