THE Friends of Okehampton Hospital are calling for members of the community to join the group to prove the hospital’s importance to the town.

The friends’ group is anxious that the community covered by Okehampton Hospital demonstrates its support for the hospital to ensure that the North Devon Healthcare Trust and the local commissioning group are aware of the high importance the local population places on facilities, including the inpatient beds at their hospital. 

Okehampton Hospital recently avoided cuts after doctors agreed to consolidate overnight inpatient beds at Eastern Devon’s community hospitals.

Axminster, Crediton and Ottery St Mary lost their overnight inpatient beds, but Okehampton remained unchanged, keeping its 16 beds.

Speaking when the decision was made in July, friends’ chairman Martin Perry said the clinical commissioning group’s decision to keep all of Okehampton’s inpatient beds was a ‘huge relief’.

The friends’ group plays a hugely important role in ensuring that Okehampton Hospital has important equipment sorely needed by patients.

Over the last two years alone, the group has purchased more than £20,000 of equipment for the hospital, including an £8,000 bladder scanner and equipment for the leg ulcer and occupational therapy clinics costing £4,000.

In addition, nearly £12,000 was spent in the physiotherapy department.

With the ever-tightening budgets within the NHS, demands on the friends’ group is getting ever more pressing.

Mr Perry has said that the group would ‘continue to try to ensure that remains the case in the future, but it largely depends on the support we can muster from the community’.

He said: ‘We have always had good support and in this way have been able to maintain and improve local healthcare facilities. 

‘Last year we spent nearly £12,000 in the physiotherapy department, Dartmoor Ward, maternity ward and elsewhere, but this money needs to be raised and we look to events to help along with what we hope will be an increase in membership.  It costs only 20p a week to join — £10 a year.’

To find out more about becoming a member of the friends’ group call chairman Martin Perry on 01409 221376.