Kevin Pyne, of Lake Street, Dartmouth, writes:

So all the assurances as to our the future of our cottage hospital staying open were nothing more then cheap ­promises and downright lies, as many of us suspected.

Secretly we all knew that the powers that be could not keep their grubby little mitts off one of the best bits of resaleable real estate in the west of England.

Nor should we make any other assertions, because that is what this is about, and if we sit down and take it then we are all of us mad.

Oh, and please don’t offer up Torbay Hospital as a magical, all-curing alternative: it’s on the other side of the river and you can’t get there because of our river late at night and because of the summer traffic at other times.

How well I remember how I nearly met my end there and spent the next six months in hospital, ending up so mutilated that the doctors who put me back together described my injuries as looking like I had stood on a mine.

And what irony when we only rededicated the palliative care suite that is named for my late wife who died there aged 46 after a long illness around a year ago.

It doesn’t surprise me that while we were doing this some of the cynics standing beside me must have already been plotting our wonderful hospital’s demise.

I spent months there and when admitted I was less than eight stone and I still had a catheter that staff at a major hospital told me I might have for ever. The nurses at Dartmouth got rid of it, for which I am eternally grateful.

Oh sure, many of my loved ones have died there, but like myself people recover there, and not because of miracle drugs, it is due to the tender care of the hospital staff and the wonderful river view.

I have been in other hospitals at night listening to old folk calling out for assistance that did not come and I have been bullied and threatened by ­nursing staff in other hospitals.

I was even told, after a colostomy, to just soil the bed as the nurse was too busy ­chatting with her mates at the nursing station. I wasn’t 50 at the time and that was not about to happen, and yet nothing like that ever happened to me in Dartmouth’s wonderful hospital, as it was all about kindness and care and getting me back into the community that I love.

The problem with the NHS is that the top administrators in smart suits are paid far too much and often operate within a culture of fear. They are the ones who need to be replaced by proper working doctors. As a long-term patient with not much to do between treatments, I have watched it day by day.

Years ago, when returning my wife to Dartmouth Hospital after cancer treatment at Derriford Hospital, I remember being told by an outside hospital administrator that ‘I couldn’t park in the hospital car park, as the space was needed for a very important regional administrator’. You can guess what I told him – and that’s how pretty much how I feel about the threat to Dartmouth Hospital.

So come on Sarah Wollaston, let’s crush this latest attempt to kill off one of Dartmouth’s greatest assets before it’s too late. If not we will be lost in the mumbo-jumbo and jargon that really means someone’s already wealthy mate wants our hospital land so as to make a huge killing on the property market, as is the way of the once great, but now greedy, Britain.