I am dismayed and unconvinced on the arguments set out Joint Medical Director (Mr. Mike Bailey) of BSBV regarding his comment on the proposals to centralise services with the potential loss of A&E, maternity and paediatric services for Epsom and St Helier Hospitals.

It is incredulous to think that residents of the boroughs will now have no accident and emergency services available for residents in Sutton and Epsom.

The BSBV answer is to centralise services in order to expand emergency services. The flaw in such a proposal is that residents will now no longer have access to local A&E, maternity and paediatric services.

It was so nice to know that I had the security of being able to attend my local A&E (St Hellier) when I recently had a severly cut finger.

Surely hospital services should be focused on ensuring that customers have access to available local services without recourse to travelling half way around the county as the present reconfiguration proposals seems to suggest.

This would affect all members of the community including the young and Elderly. His statement "after reconfiguration the three hospitals would therefore have larger units" ignores the fact that local A&Es are there available to support local patients.

Centralisation by definition means that services will never be local. Shouldn’t the service be designed to support local residents and not of the supposed needs of the BSBV.

The proposals to close the ‘too busy to cope’ A&E departments of St Hellier are not only ill thought out but ignorance in its conception.

Andrew Duck, via email