TO some people, the current proposals to remove several inpatient services from Wycombe Hospital will represent a logical extension of the changes that have gone before, and are indeed a sensible tidying-up exercise to save duplication and concentrate expertise in one place.

However, the Bucks Free Press does not accept this logic and urges residents to resist these moves at all costs.

We are not luddites and we do support radical changes that will improve our NHS and save cash. We even accept the need for specialisation and centralisation in some cases.

But what we do not accept is the continual erosion of Wycombe Hospital from its once proud status as a general medical facility that served a spectrum of conditions and illnesses.

We also, by the way, never accepted the unfounded rumours the hospital was going to close.

Instead, the dream from NHS managers appears to be to transform it into a wonderful specialist centre that can treat a limited number of disciplines extremely well. And that would be fair enough if the Wycombe district was not such a large centre of population. It might also be fair enough if Stoke Mandeville was not so inaccessible by road.

The current upside down health strategy seems to be – in our supposedly green eco-friendly world – to make more patients, visitors and ambulances travel further for their essential health needs.

Again that might even work if the entire population was totally mobile. But what about, for instance, the elderly infirm of south Bucks whose spouse is taken into inpatient care in Aylesbury? Previously, they could have visited each day in High Wycombe, by taxi if necessary.

Now they will either have to rely on a free bus, which might be impossible for them to use, or on the generosity of others to ferry them along the A4010 on that awkward trip. Or they might not visit at all, to the detriment of their elderly spouse.

There will be other similar scenarios that will unfold during the consultation period.

So we send down a challenge to NHS officials. If this really is a proper consultation, then please listen to the feedback and, this time unlike 2004, why don’t you actually do what the public wants?