South west London NHS officials have released their report into a year of conversations with the public, and referred to people’s concerns over plans to merge Epsom and St Helier acute care.

The South West London Health and Care Partnership, a group of six CCGs, published “You said, we did… and are doing”, looking at feedback from 5,000 local people in 2016/17.

Anxiety over the future of Epsom and St Helier hospitals appears to have informed a lot of the conversations, and the trust is mentioned several times in the report.

One section lists public concern about travel times to acute hospitals, and the feeling that the people want to keep the facilities nearby.

In the report, released on March 26, officials said: “We know that it is really important for people to be able to easily access their local hospital. We believe that we will continue to need all our hospitals though we do not think every hospital has to provide every service.

“We will not be closing any of them. There’s an ongoing piece of analysis about the way acute hospitals work; the first piece we’ve looked at in detail is consultant staffing over six core hospital services areas, and what that has told us is that there is a challenge at Epsom and St Helier.”

Commissioners in Merton, Sutton and Surrey Downs have set up an Acute Sustainability Programme, looking at how best to ensure the trust “continues to deliver high-quality, safe and sustainable acute services”, hoping to work with the trust and local people.

The trust has said it will be increasingly unable to meet a proper standard of care in the long term across two hospitals due to there not being enough senior specialists.

The Epsom and St Helier 2020-2030 summer-long engagement programme set out the trust’s case for moving acute care to one of either Epsom Hospital, St Helier Hospital or a new unit at the Royal Marsden in Sutton.

Nearly 80 per cent of the 1,059 respondents agreed with the trust that a single 500-bed specialist site would best serve patients.