THE MP for Frome, Anna Sabine has publicly thanked NHS staff at a community hospital who saved her husband’s life.

In a Westminster Hall debate about the future of community hospitals across the UK, Mrs Sabine publicly thanked staff at Frome Community Hospital for saving her husband after he went into anaphylactic shock earlier this year.

She went on to urge both the government and the NHS Somerset integrated care board (ICB) to ensure community hospitals were properly equipped and funded as part of wider reforms to the UK health service.

She said: “Community hospitals are the backbone of local healthcare. They keep people closer to home, ease pressure on our general hospitals and allow families to support loved ones through recovery without the burden of long journeys.

“That is especially so in more rural areas like my constituency, where travel times can be long and public transport is limited.

“For many of my constituents, Frome Community Hospital is an important community hub, where people access lifesaving care for themselves and their families.

“In fact, my husband’s life was saved by a team at Frome Hospital earlier this year, when he went into anaphylactic shock and was able to get to the urgent care department in Frome much quicker than he could have got to the general hospital in Bath.

“I put on record my thanks to the nurses who treated him that day.”

Frome Community Hospital is one of several community hospitals in Somerset where inpatient beds have been removed by the ICB during “test and learn” exercises.

Mrs Sabine said these exercises had been “very unclear” and questioned whether reducing these beds was contributing to ‘bed-blocking’.

She explained: “I know from visiting the Royal United Hospital in Bath, that one of the biggest challenges facing it is getting patients discharged to appropriate community settings.

“One of the main reasons that ambulances queue at our general hospital is because, at the other end of the hospital, patients cannot be discharged to community settings – yet we are cutting beds in those settings.

“I am therefore unconvinced that these bed cuts can be justified. I have continued to push for the restoration of the beds at Frome Hospital.

“I have also spoken to the ICB about the possibility of the hospital becoming one of the community hubs that the government have rolled out, which I think could be a really good opportunity for semi-rural areas.

“I was given a list of locations that had already been chosen, none of which were located in Frome and East Somerset. I do not believe that that is how engagement with elected representatives is supposed to work.”

The ICB is currently in the process of merging with the ICBs in Bath and North East Somerset, Dorset, Swindon and Wiltshire, with the new ‘cluster’ organisation officially set to take over the allocation of local NHS funding by late-2027.

Mrs Sabine added: “My constituents deserve a community hospital that reflects the needs of a growing town and a process that treats them as genuine partners in shaping it.”