THE fight to secure the future of community hospitals has been put at the top of a North Yorkshire MP’s agenda for the year ahead.

In her New Year message, Anne McIntosh, who represents Thirsk and Malton, said she would focus on trying to ensure health services in the area survive and bridging the gap in funding which has left the region worse off than other parts of the UK.

The Conservative MP also said tackling the curse of flooding will be high on her to-do list for 2011, which she said would be an “exciting and challenging time” under the first full year of the coalition Government.

Ms McIntosh said: “Living in rural North Yorkshire, the greatest challenges concern our deeply rural, sparsely-populated area with an increasingly elderly population.

“People greatly value their GP and care very passionately and emotionally about their local community hospital.

“Preserving and enhancing their services are vital to maintaining the needs and well-being of our community.

“I shall continue to fight for the future of the services of all local community hospitals in Thirsk, Malton and Easingwold and I look forward to the time of GP commissioning in 2012. We must remove the inequalities in health spending as North Yorkshire currently receives less per patient than anywhere else.”

Fears over the outlook for Malton Hospital recently rose with the closure of its Ryedale ward, leaving elderly and vulnerable people facing long journeys to access treatment, and Ms McIntosh has previously aired worries that this could be part of a “wider pattern” of scaling down community hospital services.

“We also need to reduce the risk from flooding, a risk which is only likely to increase with the effects of climate change,” she said.

On a national level, Ms McIntosh said tackling the national deficit was “the single most pressing issue facing the Government”.