My first memory of the George Eliot Hospital was as an eight year old when I was admitted with suspected meningitis. Thankfully, I did not have meningitis but the hospital was there for me just as it was when I was admitted with concussion from playing football and, again, at the time of the births of our two children. There are countless other times when my family and I have depended on the care and medical skill of the Eliot.
I was therefore alarmed at the suggestions from the local NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) report - which had been leaked - that A&E and Maternity services at the Eliot were under threat of closure.
The local NHS chiefs responsible for the report immediately made a statement refuting the claims made.
By the time that you read this column the STP report will be available and the public will be able to see for themselves what is or is not being proposed.
Putting the process of the STP to one side, the overriding thing for me is the importance of these services at the Eliot to local people and the sheer impracticality of moving either service to the University Hospital in Coventry (UHCW).
If we take A&E for example. At the Eliot 250 people a day visit the A&E for treatment. This figure will only increase as more new homes are built in our area. If you add those 250 people to the 500 that UHCW sees then you have a huge A&E demand and it would be highly questionable as to whether it would be workable to have such a large hospital unit.
When you then factor in the travel distances, particularly for people coming from the Bosworth and North Warwickshire area, then the inaccessibility of the UHCW site would prove a recipe for disaster.
The same goes for Maternity services, with over 2,000 babies delivered every year at the Eliot.
To expand departments at UHCW it would also take significant sums of capital money to make the changes necessary to house such large departments.
In my view, we need to make services sustainable through our hospitals working together by sharing consultants, doctors and nurses. Services must be of high quality but they also must be accessible. We also need to be getting our doctors and nurses out more into the community so as to reduce hospital admissions wherever we can.
UHCW provides important services to many people from Nuneaton and the surrounding area, and we must make sure that we have safe services. But we cannot use this STP process as a cover to strip away important local services.
One of the big challenges to our local health economy is the PFI that UHCW was built under in 2006. The massive mortgage that comes with PFI has weighed heavily on the local health economy. Ever since there have periodically been suggestions that services should be rationalised. The challenge was always that UHCW was not actually designed to take the volume of patients that rationalisation would produce.
My sincerest hope is that the STP will prove to be a far more balanced document than those who leaked it would have us believe.
Services must change and evolve to make sure that people are well served by our NHS, but that must not be a cover for inappropriate rationalisation.
I will be looking at the report very carefully. Together with my parliamentary colleague Craig Tracey, the member for Bedworth and North Warwickshire, we will oppose any suggestions for change that are not in the interest of local people.
On a lighter note, I welcome the Christmas tree that has just been erected in the Town Centre. It's good to see that the Council have finally listened on this issue. Let's hope they realise that the Town Centre is for life and not just for Christmas!