'Barmy' hospital plan

This week the ex-Rother chairman vowed to fight the idea when it comes before a consultation meeting on NHS reforms at the Cooden Beach Hotel.

The June 21 meeting could follow the stormy precedent set when local stakeholders loudly voiced their objections at the hotel to a series of NHS economy mergers including a single Primary Care Trust for the whole of East Sussex.

Though mergers of the strategic health authority and ambulance trusts have been rubber-stamped, the PCT merger has just been dropped in favour of a merger locally of the Bexhill and Rother and Hastings and St Leonards PCTs.

Threats to the future of the accident and emergency units at the Conquest Hospital at Hastings and Eastbourne District General Hospital have already caused a furore, with protest groups in each town.

The League of Friends of Bexhill Hospital has been invited by its Eastbourne counterpart together with the Conquest league to a joint meeting at Eastbourne in a bid to find common ground for joint opposition to A and E merger.

But Monday's news story that a compromise "solution" by health service chiefs could be a "shared" system on alternate days seems likely to please nobody.

Cllr Dyason is not only a Rother member for Collington Ward but a county councillor for the new King Offa division.

He told the Observer this week: "This covers five Rother wards including two wards with accepted social deprivation and wards with large elderly populations.

"I am really concerned about this proposal.

"We have been invited to a meeting at the Cooden Beach Hotel on June 21 to talk about the re-organisation of health services - again - and I shall certainly go and fight our corner.

"In the report it says we don't necessarily have to go to A and E for everything and I agree with that - provided there is adequate provision."

Cllr Dyason has recently had personal reason to appreciate how thinly stretched existing A and E cover is.

"We had to go to the Conquest. We arrived at 6.30. We didn't get out until 11.45.

"What on earth is it going to be like if they try to cram two units into one?

"It's just barmy."