The post you are reporting:
FWIW there was a letter in the Dover Express earlier this year which ran:-
Whilst the restructuring of health care, giving two high-tech 'centres of excellence' at Ashford and QEQM, served by Outpatient Facilities and Minor Injuries at Dover and Deal, will provide the hospitals we need for the 21st century, they require a well planned and integrated transport system to serve them.
When the NHS representatives appeared before the Scruitiny Committee at DDC I put it to them that most of us are going to need their services when we are either coming into this world or leaving it.
It is the old and the young who are most likely to need public transport provision as they are the least likely to have their own transport or spare money for Taxi fares.
They are also the ones for whom, with mobility problems or encumbered with pushchairs and children, changing buses becomes more than a minor inconvenience.
Whilst it makes clinical sense that maternity services are located in major hospitals, where post natal care of the highest standard can be offered, there is at present no direct bus service from Dover or Deal to William Harvey Hospital to allow partners, relatives or siblings to visit new mothers.
For the elderly there is no direct bus which will carry them from Dover or Deal to QEQM.
We can not expect a complete duplication of outpatients service in Deal and Dover so where is the direct bus from Deal Town to Buckland or Dover Town to Deal Hospital?
As a minimum we need a service running between William Harvey Hospital- Dover Town - Buckland Hospital -Deal - Deal Hospital - Sandwich - QEQM.
Whilst this would be serve patients/visitors, incentivising other passengers to use the buses would cross-subsidise the service.
If the eastern section travelled via Westwood and the route extended to Margate it would give some of the ½ million high spending visitors a year to the Turner Contemporary a chance to visit prize winning Deal High Street or join the 1/3 million visitors a year at Dover Castle for example.
Extending the route from QEQM to the factory outlet at Ashford would give locals a chance to shop there for goods not readily available in our own town centres as well as giving 80,000 Ashford residents the opportunity for a night out at the proposed Dover Multiplex Cinema or to enjoy a day trip to France.
One hopes that NHS planners of all people are not suffering from myopia, and that when finally revealed, the transport plan is much more than an improvement in getting some patients to some hospitals.
As most of us realise by now, once an inadequate plan is imposed by those who we foolishly thought knew what they were doing, it takes decades to remedy. I won't bother citing the many local examples!