At this morning’s NHS Clinical Commissioning Group meeting it was decided that the number of community hospital beds in North Devon should be reduced from 72 to 40.

The voting was unanimously in favour. It should be noted that, with one exception, all those who are allowed to vote are local GPs. So this wasn’t a decision made by faceless managers but one made by practising local doctors.

The next step in the process is to decide where those beds should be, and therefore which community hospitals will lose their beds. This certainly doesn’t mean that any hospitals will close but it does mean that there will be a change of focus.