I USED to work as a principal speech and language therapist in the NHS.

I led a specialist team working with children with profound disabilities.

I loved the job – and I hated having to take ill-health retirement when health problems caught up with me.

The plan was for retirement. Gentle walks, gardening, cooking… It didn’t happen, because ‘Future Fit’ cuts and closure plans came along instead.

Closing an A&E was the wrong thing to do in a huge rural area like Shropshire.

When I looked at the clinical evidence, it didn’t stack up.

The Future Fit proposals were about worse healthcare, dressed up in fancy language.

I talked to friends in Ludlow and around Shropshire. We decided to get organised: to set up Shropshire Defend Our NHS as a broad-based inclusive campaign.

We have a clinical basis for the case we put forward. We don’t scaremonger, ever. We support change in the NHS when it’s in the interests of patients - but we know change needs looking at!

Planned changes for Shropshire’s NHS include £3.8 million cuts to community hospitals, and rationing of hip and knee replacement surgery.

There are shocking proposals: for annual cuts of £150 million to our local NHS – and for 2,000 local NHS workers to lose their jobs.

Rural maternity units, including Ludlow, are under threat.

Is this in the interests of Shropshire people?

Of course not.

The pretence is that volunteers and ‘community resilience’ can fill all the gaps left by cuts, but no one really believes this.

These are the things Shropshire Defend Our NHS will be taking up in 2017.

We’re proud that we’ve delayed A&E closure in 2016; got Stroke Rehab brought back to Shrewsbury; stopped £670,000 of cuts to services for people with mental health problems and frail elderly people. It’s great to have worked with the Save Ludlow Maternity Unit group.

We’ll continue to campaign hard. If you can help, please get in touch: info@shropshiredefendournhs.org.

There’s one thing we’ve not solved.

Shropshire’s NHS is in financial crisis. There’s just not enough money coming in.

The NHS nationally is in trouble too, with spending sliding further and further behind other developed countries. 2017 is decision time.

If we choose to look after sick and vulnerable members of our society, we have to pay for that.

If this is our choice, we need to ask Shropshire’s MPs – and particularly Philip Dunne as health minister – to look again at funding of health and social care.