TETBURY Hospital is set to become the first casualty of the NHS shake-up with the loss of all its beds.

The Standard can exclusively reveal wards will close at the community hospital in December after health service funding was withdrawn.

Simon Preston, chairman of trustees at Tetbury Hospital, said: "The NHS are trying to shut beds in Bourton, Fairford, Moreton and community hospitals are not the flavour of the month. This has now hit us in a rather more serious way.

"Tetbury Hospital is outside the NHS as a trust but we do have a contract with them for providing services for them."

Mr Preston said because the hospital's relationship with the NHS was commercial there would be no public consultation over the cuts.

Funding for the six consultant elderly care beds will be stopped and Mr Preston explained this will make the remaining five beds totally unviable.

As a result the hospital will have to close all inpatient care after December 31 this year.

This is a huge blow to the popular hospital, which has been largely funded by the Tetbury community.

Simon Preston said: "It is going to be a very nasty shock. The people of Tetbury are not going to be happy because they have all put money into saving the hospital.

Tetbury mayor Stephen Hirst likened the closure of the wards without prior consultation to an act of public vandalism.

Dr Tony Walsh said the hospital beds were still needed at Tetbury. He said: "I have taken two people there in the past five days who could not have been managed elsewhere.

"I don't think there is a future for community hospitals at the moment, it doesn't look that way. I think they have been badly let down by the Cotswold and Vale Primary Care Trust (PCT)."

Cotswold MP Geoffrey Clifton-Brown also slammed the latest blow to health services in the area.

He said: "It's far too short a time so no one has been consulted. Communist dictatorships behave in this way. We all have to think of everyway to oppose this whether it is marching on Downing Street or whatever."

Mr Clifton-Brown vowed to support the people of Tetbury in whatever way he could to ensure the future of Tetbury Hospital.

Richard James, chief executive of Cotswold and Vale PCT, said: "Cotswold and Vale Primary Care Trust (PCT) is reviewing the services it provides for local people to ensure it provides better healthcare, closer to where people live.

"This is why the PCT has proposed to commission more outpatient services at Tetbury Hospital in place of six of the 11 inpatient beds there that it currently funds.

"These six beds cost the PCT £300,000 a year. It believes it can provide better services to the wider community through a combination of increased outpatient services, delivered from Tetbury hospital at a cost of £150,000, and by developing specialist rehabilitation services for elderly people to enable them to get better quicker and return home sooner from the larger and better resourced Stroud and Cirencester hospitals."

Mr Preston said the trustees were currently looking at a number of options to safegaurd the hospital's future.

He said: "The hospital trustees are trying to do everything we can to keep the trust going and hopefully keep the hospital going but it will have to be a very different organisation. The losing of those eleven beds represents a drop in income of 55 percent."