Five key reasons why you should join our campaign

1. Shutting the 37 beds at the hospital will mean that dozens of very sick and old people will have to be moved to other hospitals away from the friendly staff and environment which has cared for them so well.

2. Surbiton Hospital provides a vital overflow for patients from Kingston Hospital, particularly during the winter months when the pressure on beds there is intense. The beds at Surbiton Hospital allow mainly elderly patients, who no longer need the acute care Kingston provides, to recover in their own time in a hospital focused on this type of care. This frees up beds at the acute hospital needed by more urgent cases.

3. Surbiton Hospital has provided excellent local health care to people living in Surbiton and Tolworth for almost 70 years. If it closes the range of services it provides will have to move elsewhere - with local people having to travel further to be treated.

4. Any major change to the provision of services at Surbiton Hospital should be fully thought through and properly planned. And it should only be implemented after full consultation with the community and all those affected - not as a knee-jerk reaction to a short-term financial problem facing the Primary Care Trust.

5. There are very real fears in the community that once services are moved out of the hospital the trust will sell off part or all of the valuable site to developers. Residents helped build and have supported Surbiton Hospital for decades. They are not against the much-needed modernisation of the hospital. But what they do not want is for this superb local resource to be sold-off to developers and the money spent elsewhere.