SERIOUS concerns have been expressed to me by staff and customers about the proposals to close the Stourport Royal Mail Delivery Office.

I wrote to the Chief Executive of Royal Mail about this before Christmas as we need to know if they have considered the cost implications and the effects not only on staff but on customers.

Travel to Kidderminster will be unacceptable for Stourport people and businesses to collect undelivered mail and for staff, some of whom are part-time.

Good news from some of our schools – Birchen Coppice Primary School has come out of Notice to Improve; Baxter College has had a recent Ofsted and been rewarded with a report of good with outstanding features and Comberton Primary School has won a Design Mark Award for excellence in Design and Technology teaching. Congratulations to all involved.

Health matters are high on the agenda at the moment. NHS Worcestershire has unveiled its welcome draft cancer strategy.

It is quite ridiculous that our county’s people are split under three different cancer networks. This must be addressed. The decision about the site of head and neck cancer services has been deferred not least because of my letters to, and meetings with the National Cancer Director and the Chief Executives of the Southwest and the West Midlands Strategic Health Authorities to whom I made it clear that if these services moved from Worcester to Gloucester all such patients from the north of the county would choose to go to Birmingham or Wolverhampton.

Thus the unit, if in Gloucester, would lose a large number of its patients when the reason for merger was to increase the numbers of patients with rare conditions seen for treatment in a combined unit.

A predictable disappointment has been announced. Owing to shortages of staff in the A&E departments at Worcester and Redditch we are to lose the hard-won doctor in the minor injuries unit (MIU) at Kidderminster.

We are told this will be temporary but I doubt this as to me the service was set up to fail. The doctor’s presence from 9am to 5pm on weekdays only was not when there was the greatest need as GP surgeries are open then.

The service has not been promoted enough to reduce the workload on the A&E departments and so has proved too expensive for its limited benefit.

With changes that I expect to our out-of-hours GP service the battle will re-commence to get a doctor to cover both the primary care centre and the MIU at Kidderminster for a realistic part of evenings and weekends which is when we most need improvements to our urgent care services.

I have written before about the proposal, which I have pushed very hard in Parliament, for a 3- digit phone number for those who do not need to dial 999 for a life-threatening emergency, but need appropriate advice about where they should seek urgent care when they do not have easy access to an A&E department. Such a number is being piloted and will be a boon to us when it is rolled out.

Dr Richard Taylor MP