Save Moretonhampstead Hospital

Moretonhampstead Community Hospital was built in 1900–1901 under the patronage of the Hambleden family for the people of Moretonhampstead and the surrounding area. Although it no longer has inpatient beds, it remains an important community asset, well suited to hosting local healthcare, district nursing, a care agency, and wider community initiatives. It has been extensively and continuously used since it's inception. 

NHS Property Services is now preparing to sell the building on the open market or to a charitable community bid. This follows more than a decade of effort by the local GP practice, Wellmoor, and other groups to secure a future for the site. The Parish Council has also supported attempts to keep the building in public use. To date, our MP has offered intermittent but inconsistent support and has not secured any sustained stability for the building, while Devon ICB and NHSPS have shown no willingness to invest in it, either financially or philosophically.

The last remaining vestige of NHS provision in the hospital was the district nursing team, co-ordinating local housebound care and using the building for ad-hoc clinics, catheter changes, patient reviews, and complex leg dressings. We were informed earlier this year that the district nurses were required to leave because the roof was leaking and the building was unsafe. Once vacated, we understand Devon ICB was able to declare the site surplus to requirements and instruct NHS Property Services to begin disposal. Following the eviction of the nurses to a local industrial complex, I have since been informed by NHSPS that the roof has been repaired which seems at odds to the original narrative. 

NHS Property Services has not allowed local organisations full access to undertake an independent survey, preventing the community from developing an informed proposal for its reuse.

The GP practice supports a community-led plan or retention in the NHS, but cannot afford to purchase the hospital and cannot relocate. It must remain at the existing health centre, which also requires investment for renovation and improvement. It already maximises the existing space and frequently has to turn providers away who would otherwise operate locally if adjacent space in the hospital building was available. There have been unfulfilled assurances from Devon ICB about preserving some parking on the hospital site to enable an expansion of the health centre. This makes either retaining the hospital within the NHS or transferring it into community ownership even more important—allowing the building to host local healthcare, district nursing, a care agency, and community wellbeing projects, while GP services remain based at the health centre.

Local residents, the GP practice, and community groups could take responsibility for the hospital if given the necessary time, access, and support. This would protect the building for NHS and community purposes and prevent its loss to private development.

Watching the building drift toward a quiet sale is regrettably unsurprising. Rural primary care and rural communities have long been treated as peripheral—too small to prioritise, too remote to understand, too insignificant to influence larger strategies. Efficiency has eroded locality, often at the expense of what worked, because it is too subtle or complex to measure quickly and itemise on a spreadsheet. 

The government’s 10-year plan for the NHS barely acknowledges rural general practice. Our population faces real difficulty travelling to Exeter or Okehampton for alternative services. The population demographic is heavily skewed to the more elderly with increasingly complex health needs, with spasmodic and limited public transport accessing care is a problem. The system continues to pursue larger hubs, larger networks, and administrative geographies that do not fit. Yet all practical evidence points the other way: small communities function well. We support one another, we adapt, and we deliver forms of care no distant “neighbourhood model” can replicate.

The hospital has stood for more than a century, shaped by the same landscape that shaped the town. Conan Doyle wrote of Dartmoor that “The longer one stays here the more the spirit of the moor sinks into one’s soul.” It has sunk into this building too—into its granite walls, into its purpose, and the generations it has served. Bureaucracy may miss what is obvious to those who live here: this building is not surplus; it is an anchor. If it is lost, it will be because the system has forgotten what community healthcare looks like.