It is a great shame that our MP, Dr Sarah Wollaston, chairman of the Commons Health Select Committee, was unable to attend, due to a previous engagement, the public meeting held on Monday at St Saviour’s Church, Dartmouth, which was called to discuss the worrying state of hospital facilities for the town and surrounding villages – some 10,000 people – of whom some 400 packed into the church.

Their questions and concerns were poorly answered by the South Devon and Torbay Clinical Commissioning Group and what emerged was the fact that Dartmouth is the most ill-served town for hospital and emergency services in the UK.

One questioner asked what difference the meeting was going to make. It was not answered – the true answer being “none”.

So perhaps we should appeal directly to the Health Secretary himself, Jeremy Hunt, who, after all, spent some of his childhood in Dartmouth when his late father, Nick Hunt, was captain of Britannia Royal Naval College.

He and his wife Meriel, a former naval nursing sister, were great supporters of the town and would have been the first to attend this meeting to improve Dartmouth’s appall­ing health cover, cancelling, if necessary, a previous engagement so to do.

Adrian Lloyd-Edwards

New Road, Stoke Fleming