ARCHWAYS’ provision of transitional care provides a model of healthcare for the future not the past (The Press, August 17).

Inter-disciplinary assessment, treatment and rehabilitation can keep people out of acute hospitals and provide patients the right support and confidence to return home safely.

Cost-cutting closures in the intermediate sector of healthcare is short term.

Having worked in rehabilitation as a senior physiotherapist, the Trust are wrong to claim that this kind of clinical setting could “do harm to older people” by citing an example of “ten days of bed rest”.

Of course, transitional care is not for everyone. However, for those who are correctly assessed for places like Archways, it is about getting people’s confidence and promoting independence – dynamic interventions, so when an individual returns home they don’t bounce back into hospital.

All too often people go home too soon from hospital and apart from the short visits from clinicians, receive no interventions.

Clinical settings enable occupational therapists, physios, nursing staff and others to work together to get people right for home.

The York Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, like 80 per cent of the Trusts in the country fell into debt last year. This is because of the wrong financial drivers put into the NHS through the Government’s Health and Social Care Act, not this clinical model of provision.

I have written to the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, to highlight the complete lack of consultation over these major changes.

Patients must not pay the price for this political failure.

Rachael Maskell, York Central MP