So the River View care home at Townstall is to close and has presumably given its residence notice to go where one can’t help but wonder

While a mile and a bit down the road stands a fine hospital, mostly paid for by donations from its legion of friends and closed in its prime all because the local community cared more about kicking off regarding Costa coffee coming to the town then protecting their treasure of a cottage hospital .

Now a cynic might say what a nice block of flats River View will make when a concerned district council gave it planning permission to be a rest home

And while I agree with MP Sarah Wollaston over a lot of things, I believe that she has failed us over this, as did the Government and others who went around the town saying we should accept River View as the closure of our wonderful hospital was inevitable.

These people should be ashamed of themselves in the light of this.

So now we have nothing and if you, like me, need medical treatment you are back and forth to Torbay when it could and should be done in our own town.

I respect our doctors and they are the medical experts, however I feel that we, their patients, need listening to and we want our hospital back.

You saw in the recent snow how the ferries, presumably for health and safety reasons, simply stopped.

If you have been in Torbay Hospital recently, as I have, you can see what pressures the staff are under .

Perhaps we should storm the hospital building and occupy it but I am far too much of a law- abiding coward to do this, when I truly wish that I wasn’t.

But I do know that there is a wonderful palliative care suit named for my late wife in there doing nothing that wasn’t even two years old and that some fantastic nursing staff and auxiliaries who gave their lives and careers to the place where treated shamefully

There are too many people trying to profit from the old and the sick when a modern civilised nation should just bear the cost and, if taxes go up, then they go up

We have been let down and made fools of in the most cynical way

Kevin Pyne

Lake Street, Dartmouth