THE news that Dorset County Hospital (‘Plea for DCH Funds’ February 14) is to receive £62m for important extensions to A&E and the Intensive Care Unit is good news as far as it goes. Sadly, that is not actually very far.

Apart from the Robert White Centre for the treatment of some cancer patients, there has been no significant capital spending at the hospital in this century, while the number of residents in the catchment area has continued to rise.

A&E is coping with twice its designed capacity little more than twenty years after its opening, a sure sign of an original under-prediction of rising demand, but the promised money will become available only in five years’ time, for a completion date further into the future. That assumes that the commitment is honoured (by the next government, not this one).

Senior hospital figures, Mark Addison and Patricia Miller, backed by our local MPs, are absolutely right to insist that the present situation is unsustainable. It is to be hoped that their plea for a swifter down-payment, however inadequate in relation to need, will be fully met.

In the meantime, in any sane world with joined-up planning, this delay must surely put a full brake on any new housing developments in the area, if the nature of the development is likely to attract new residents rather than provide the social or genuinely affordable housing so desperately needed for inadequately housed local people. I suspect this is a vain hope.

Partly encouraging as the hospital plans are, there is still no hint of any intention to extend other DCH facilities, such as Maternity and Paediatrics (the Kingfisher Ward) to keep their capacities in line with the projected growing population in the “once-in-a-generation opportunity” heralded by DCH’s “masterplan” for a “long term project”.

This plan still looks horribly incomplete and far from long-term.

We were told in June 2018: “The British public voted for £350m a week for the NHS. We will deliver that - and more.” (Jeremy Hunt, Health & Social Care Secretary). It becomes available next January. Can we have a decent chunk of it for DCH please?

Barry Tempest

Romulus Close

Dorchester