Fighting for a new hospital for Tenby over the past year has left one of the leading campaigners feeling 'dismayed' and 'disappointed' about the break-up of health care services in the area.

Speaking at Tuesday's annual general meeting of the Friends of the Cottage Hospital, chairman Mrs. Pat Wright said that it had been another year of 'dissolutionment and indecision' and 'another time of raising our hopes quickly to be followed by one of disappointment'.

"The whole period, many many years, has I feel been a very expensive process, leading I'm afraid to the loss of our hospital, only to be replaced by a glorified social services centre as it is now to be called," she said.

"I only hope I'm wrong, but I feel the young and able are to be serviced at the expense of the elderly.

"I have sat during the past 12 months through Local Health Board and Trust meetings and very rarely is the word care or patient mentioned. In fact, patients, particularly the elderly, are a bit of an enigma to both the Trust and Health Board, followed closely by the doctors and the medical profession, whom the Local Health Board see as a necessary intrusion into the running of the Health Service in Pembrokeshire," she continued.

"These very well paid administrators are I feel full of their own importance and only really interested in the furtherance of their own careers.

"My dismay and disappointment in the contents of the final Business Plan for the south-east Pembrokeshire area, is compounded by the lack of democracy in which the whole procedure has been evolved," she opined.

"Our administrators have completely ignored the wishes of the local population, our MP Nick Ainger, our AM Christine Gwyther and other prominent members of the Welsh Assembly government, and now it also appears the wishes and instructions of Jane Hutt, the Health Minister."

Looking to the future, Mrs. Wright's concerns lay with the placement of patients within the private sector.

"The lack of any firm commitment as to where the beds will go, and how the patients are to be nursed, leads me to question whether this promise will be fulfilled, or will this be seen as another means of depriving Tenby of a vital part of its health facilities," she said.

A further concern is the lack of 'real care within the home'.

"Members are frequently being told of patients being sent out of hospital without proper care packages being put in place," she explained.

"We do not have enough district nurses or carers to cope with elderly patients being discharged to their own homes. They are lonely and often feel that they have been abandoned.

"I only hope that the Trust and Local Health Board will not live to regret the decisions they made in the option they chose for the final Business Plan, and when in future years we look back, we do not have cause to ask 'what happened in 2003 that resulted in a decline in the National Health services and the demise of care and concern for patients and people?'"

During her report, Mrs. Wright also thanked her fellow campaigners and politicians of all parties for their support in the Friends' quest to retain a full hospital in Tenby.