PRIVATE hospital boss Tom Russell has weighed into the battle to keep New Forest community hospital beds open.

Cash-strapped New Forest Primary Care Trust, working with Eastleigh and Test Valley South PCT, is considering whether to close beds at Milford, Fordingbridge, Hythe, Lyndhurst and Romsey.

Instead it wants to provide care in patients' own homes or at clinics in community buildings.

A series of public consultation meetings have taken place between PCT chiefs and angry residents who want to keep beds, and hospitals, open.

Individual action groups have been formed and have now banded together as the Save Our Community Hospitals campaign.

In Milford, the managing director of St George's Nursing Home and New Forest district councillor Tom Russell has stepped into the fray.

St George's provides care for the elderly both in the nursing home and in their own homes.

Mr Russell said: "The New Forest PCT proposes to replace local community hospitals, or closed hospital beds in them, with home care but they have produced no figures and lack experience of running home care.

"I have that experience, however, and I can tell them that, if properly carried out, it costs twice as much as hospital treatment for obvious logistical reasons.

"And that is assuming that sufficient medically qualified care visitors can be recruited which is highly doubtful in a primarily rural area like the New Forest."

The PCT Alliance has said that anyone needing 24 hour hospital care will get it. Mr Russell says that if community hospitals are closed then that care will have to be provided by acute hospitals, leading to bed-blocking.

"The business plan for the new Lymington New Forest Hospital, for instance, does not include any facilities for such patients," he said.

Meanwhile the PCT has introduced new style public consultation meetings involving smaller groups.

The first was at Ringwood and the atmosphere was calmer than the eight previous heated meetings.

Vera Gough of Ringwood was in favour. She said: "It was a better idea. There was more chance to say what you wanted to say."

Betty Wright of Fordingbridge was less impressed, saying: "There was not really time to get it all out into the open."

First published: September 6, 2005