The County Primary Care Trust has decided Ludlow will bear the brunt, closing two wards, slashing beds and jobs, hitting the most vulnerable hardest, being those with mental illness. Bishop's Castle is also set to lose beds and jobs. Only Bridgnorth escapes unscathed which is, of course, very welcome.
Shrewsbury & Telford Acute Hospitals will only tell us their plans in July, despite months of planning.
Health bosses organised their first public meeting in Ludlow last week to discuss their plans. By all accounts it was not their finest hour. People in Ludlow are rightly outraged that mental health patients and staff are first in the firing line.
At the same time the PCT is refusing to follow practice in neighbouring health areas to prescribe potentially life saving drugs to breast cancer patients. The Secretary of State, Patricia Hewitt, one of the few senior Ministers to hang on to her job in the botched reshuffle the other day, let the cat out of the bag last October by stating boldly in the House of Commons that funding was not an excuse to deny treatment with Herceptin.
But she gave neither direction nor funding to PCTs to pay for the treatment. So the postcode lottery has developed for this treatment with some PCTs deciding to fund and others not.
Meanwhile we have discovered the Acute Trust bosses were proposing to charge £47,000 per patient to the PCT for Herceptin when it only costs them £24,000. Can this really be how they plan to plug part of their funding gap?
