Campaigners have staged a protest against the closure of dozens of hospital beds.
They waved placards after gathering outside Hanley’s Potteries Museum and Art Gallery earlier today.
It was organised by North Staffordshire Pensioners’ Convention just days after all 64 beds closed at Bradwell Hospital.
That means every community hospital bed has already been mothballed at Bradwell, Cheadle and Longton – to only leave beds open at Burslem’s Haywood Hospital and Leek Moorlands Hospital.
The area’s two clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have started their bed closure programme ahead of a 12-week public consultation which starts in May into the future of the hospitals.
Now campaigners have branded the move as ‘ridiculous’.
Protester and former nurse Moreen Leeming, aged 88, from Longton, said: “Closing the beds before the public consultation actually starts is disgusting. There could be a time when I need help because I sometimes trip and fall down. But there are many people who need the beds now – and I just can’t understand it.”
Full story in The Stoke Sentinel, 3 April 2017