LAST week's visit by Tony Blair to Bewdley was a further chance for local people who were opposed to changes at our hospital to demonstrate their opposition.

This is a free country and people have the right to demonstrate and express their concern - and did so.

Travelling to and from the event I explained the background to Mr Blair.

His core questions, which we came back to again and again, were "What do the public want?" and "Is it medically possible to deliver this?"

The car stickers and my postbag show very clearly what my constituents want. They want to bring back blue-light emergency services at Kidderminster.

That means keeping emergency surgery and medicine at the hospital, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

If patients with emergency medical conditions are admitted to Kidderminster Hospital, they must be treated there.

There can be no blue-light A & E without full emergency surgery and medicine.

So Mr Blair asked "Is there a safe, medically viable way to keep emergency surgery at Kidderminster?"

This is a question for doctors and health professionals, not a decision for politicians.

The answer is "No-one has found one yet".

When Health Minister, Alan Milburn, made his decision on the way forward for health services in the county in 1998, he could only decide between the options put before him.

Local people who objected to the changes sought advice from medical experts at the Kings Fund about the best way forward.

The Kings Fund firmly advised against keeping blue-light A & E and emergency surgery at Kidderminster - on medical grounds.

In December 1998, despite all the best efforts of all of us who wanted to maximise services at Kidderminster, there was no medical plan put before the Minister to keep blue-light A & E and emergency surgery at Kidderminster Hospital.

I always accepted that this is what local people wanted; I have no doubt the Minister was advised this was not medically possible and could not be delivered.

Since the decision in 1998, local campaigners have continued to object to all changes at the hospital and seek the return of all services.

That was the message delivered to Tony Blair last Thursday, and the Prime Minister got the message.

Despite all the energy of the local campaign, no medical proposals have been submitted to the health authority, the Government or (as far as I know) the Royal Colleges, which explains how to bring back blue-light emergency services to Kidderminster.

Politicians cannot and should not deliver the impossible.

Unless there is a viable medical plan to bring back emergency surgery to Kidderminster Hospital, repeated placards, bumper stickers and demonstrations - even making the case directly to the Prime Minister - are not going to make the medically impossible happen.

I got very angry last Thursday because once again local people were being misled.

The leaders of the local family doctors Dr Jim Goodman and Dr Lynn Butcher have said that bringing back emergency surgery to Kidderminster is neither possible nor preferable.

As a result they have received the type of hate mail I have endured for the last few years - yet they are caring local doctors.

The changes happened at Kidderminster Hospital happened this September and not when the new hospital opens late next year or in January 2002 because the Kidderminster consultants said it had to happen then - on the grounds of patient safety.

Despite this the early move of services is criticised by campaigners as unsafe, even though this is directly against the views of the senior doctors who required the change to happen.

With the NHS National Plan, the National Beds Inquiry, additional funding and the many other changes happening in the NHS there are possibly opportunities to create a better way forward for Kidderminster and get more services delivered here.

There are major problems with the way the changes are being delivered and I am having repeated battles with the health authority and the trusts about how the changes are affecting individual patients.

However, even if the changes had run like clockwork without the problems we are now working through, that's not the core complaint.

At the heart of this issue is that the public want to reverse the changes and no one has, to date, come up with a medically viable plan to bring emergency surgery back to Kidderminster.

Who has got the courage to explain to the public that, on medical grounds, bringing blue-light services back to Kidderminster is unsafe?

Who has got the courage to explain that, in the NHS, Government is only one partner in the medical system?

Who is going to explain to those campaigning to bring back blue-light services that Government can only deliver medical services in ways that the Royal Colleges and the consultants sign up to?

I have made these arguments repeatedly over the past three years in public and in private.

I was part of the team that brought in the Kings Fund in the hope that we could find a way to retain emergency services at Kidderminster, but the Kings Fund clearly advised us that this was not the right way forward.

I recognise that as long as the public want to keep all emergency services here (which we all want in an ideal world) and as long as there are politicians who are prepared to pretend they can deliver this even though no-one in the medical world can devise a way to make it happen, the public will continue to believe they can get all their services back.

In the present state of medicine, any politician who promises to bring back all emergency services to Kidderminster Hospital in order to get elected would be guilty of a cruel deception. It would be promising something that cannot be delivered.

In surveys, the public always say they want politicians who tell the truth. The issue here is whether this is still true if the truth is not what the public want to hear?

The Prime Minister asked me why campaigners, led by retired doctors, were asking for something that it was not medically possible to deliver.

Despite all the problems in local health services, which I freely admit and am working to resolve, that remains the core issue the community has to resolve.