CLOSURE threats hanging over two Teignbridge hospitals moved a step closer today with news that health chiefs are recommending their extinction at a crunch meeting next week.

The fate of hospitals in Ashburton and Bovey Tracey were more or less sealed this afternoon when South Devon and Torbay Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) announced that both are likely to close ‘within months’ if other home-care health provisions in the community are lined up satisfactorily in their place.

The axe will also fall on hospitals at Paignton and Dartmouth, the CCG confirmed at a briefing for stakeholders in Kingsteington this afternoon.

Campaigners hoping to save Ashburton and Buckfastleigh Hospital were encouraged that the building could be ‘evaluated’ as a base for the area’s proposed local health and wellbeing centre.

The town’s mayor and deputy mayor - John Nutley and Sarah Parker-Khan - said the concession provided some ‘glimmer of hope’ that Ashburton would at least retain some of its health services.

But the outcome for Bovey Tracey Hospital - ‘temporarily closed’ in December 2015 - was bleaker. No such provision was attached to its likely shutdown.

The town’s League of Friends chairman Avril Kerswell said she was not surprised by the afternoon’s revelations.

‘I’m bitterly disappointed,’ she said, adding that it was ‘morally wrong’ that the hospital - built by the townspeople - was not being returned to their descendants. Instead it will be sold to pay for alternative local home-based health care provision.

Both closure recommendations - and those of Paignton and Dartmouth - will be discussed and voted on by the CCG’s governing body at their meeting at Newton Abbot racecourse on Thursday morning.

Ashburton’s civic leaders hoped as many people as possible would turn up for tomorrow’s protest march through the town starting at 10.30am in Cleder Place.

Sarah Parker-Khan said: ‘These recommendations were not unforeseen. We still want people to join us on the march so they can show their displeasure at the loss of hospital beds in our town.’