By Local Democracy Reporter Daniel Mumby
Staff at Frome Community Hospital have been praised by local MP Anna Sabine for saving her husband’s life earlier this year.
In a Westminster Hall debate about the future of community hospitals across the UK, the MP publicly thanked hospital staff for saving her husband after he went into anaphylactic shock earlier this year.
She went on to urge both the government and the NHS Somerset integrated care board (ICB) to ensure community hospitals were properly equipped and funded as part of wider reforms to the UK health service.
She made her comments in a Westminster Hall debate on community hospitals on 16th June.
She said, “Community hospitals are the backbone of local healthcare. They keep people closer to home, ease pressure on our general hospitals and allow families to support loved ones through recovery without the burden of long journeys.
“That is especially so in more rural areas like my constituency, where travel times can be long and public transport is limited.
“For many of my constituents, Frome Community Hospital is an important community hub, where people access lifesaving care for themselves and their families.
“In fact, my husband’s life was saved by a team at Frome Hospital earlier this year, when he went into anaphylactic shock and was able to get to the urgent care department in Frome much quicker than he could have got to the general hospital in Bath.
“I put on record my thanks to the nurses who treated him that day.”
Frome Community Hospital is one of several community hospitals in Somerset where inpatient beds have been removed by the ICB during “test and learn” exercises – with the ICB claiming that these changes would allow a wider range of health services to be offered on the respective sites.
Anna said these exercises had been “very unclear” and questioned whether reducing these beds was contributing to ‘bed-blocking’ whereby acute hospital beds remain occupied by patients who cannot be discharged because no onward care provision is in place.
She explained, “I know from visiting the Royal United Hospital in Bath, that one of the biggest challenges facing it is getting patients discharged to appropriate community settings.
“One of the main reasons that ambulances queue at our general hospital is because, at the other end of the hospital, patients cannot be discharged to community settings – yet we are cutting beds in those settings.
“I am therefore unconvinced that these bed cuts can be justified. I have continued to push for the restoration of the beds at Frome Hospital.
“I have also spoken to the ICB about the possibility of the hospital becoming one of the community hubs that the government have rolled out, which I think could be a really good opportunity for semi-rural areas.
“I was given a list of locations that had already been chosen, none of which were located in Frome and East Somerset. I do not believe that that is how engagement with elected representatives is supposed to work, which matters particularly for constituencies like mine.”
The ICB is currently in the process of merging with the ICBs in Bath and North East Somerset, Dorset, Swindon and Wiltshire, with the new ‘cluster’ organisation officially set to take over the allocation of local NHS funding by late-2027.
Sharon Hodgson MP, parliamentary under-secretary for health and social care, thanked Anna Sabine for her “powerful account of the value of community hospitals”, reassuring her that such institutions were had the heart of the ten-year plan for the NHS.
She said, “Ultimately, the future of community hospitals should not be considered in isolation. They form part of a broader community heath infrastructure that includes neighbourhood teams, community providers, primary care, mental health services, social care and the voluntary sector.”
