Letter: MPs must step forward on need for New Forest convalescent homes

SIR – Letters highlighting the triple crises of housing for the young, controlling the growth of "retirement" housing, and the urgent need for convalescent homes in this area were right on target (Letters, 16th December).

There will have to be properly coordinated planning at local and county level if Lymington and the surrounding area is to avoid becoming overloaded with the affluent elderly, many of whom will need community care.

That could be greatly helped by housing being built for the young, with priority given to those in essential but poorly paid jobs such as carers and nurses who are now unable to afford to live locally.

This would require legislation and a change of policy, and our MPs need to take up this challenge. Will they?

When the country was in financial straits in the 1930s the local council built large numbers of houses for local council tenants; since sold off to tenants under a previous Conservative initiative.

To reduce the "bed-blocking" crisis in the hospitals we need urgently to reinstate the situation which in my years as a local GP I found invaluable, namely the availability of GP-led beds at the Fenwick and Milford "cottage" hospitals.

There we could admit frail patients in crisis, and care for the just-fit-for-discharge patients from Southampton and Bournemouth district hospitals.

As your correspondent points out, such hospitals are a very effective way of nursing when compared to district nurses trying to cope with their increasing and scattered caseload.

I appreciate that the sites of these hospitals are valuable, but it is a scandal that beds are there and empty while patients occupy hugely costly acute hospital beds.

What patients need is nursing care close to home, and there is an overwhelming case for replacing such urgently-needed facilities, rather than maximising profit from their irreplaceable sites.

The boundless energy and generosity of locals can be relied upon to support such hospitals, as we saw with the equipping of Lymington hospital by the League of Friends, and money raised by Oakhaven Hospice fundraisers.

What is vital to progress is joined-up thinking coupled with decentralisation so that the locality gets what it needs rather than what distant "planners" and "developers" decide.

The question is, how can this be brought about?

Maybe your paper could invite our MPs to express their opinions? I am sure we would all like to hear their responses.

Tom McEwen,

Pennington