West Dorset residents in the Sherborne area naturally tend to use Yeovil Hospital for the acute services that the Yeatman in Sherborne itself cannot provide.
But, for people further south, the normal destination is, of course, Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester. And Dorset County Hospital has been much on our minds recently.
As most readers of this column will undoubtedly recall, the saga began when the chairman and chief executive of the hospital left their posts amidst reports that the hospital was facing grisly deficits.
It appears that large amounts of money were spent reinforcing staffing in particular specialisms – without any equal and opposite efforts to increase efficiency, reduce the scale of management and cut the cost of back offices.
Once the crisis broke, a new chairman and chief executive were put in place. With the help and approval of the regulator (the so-called “Monitor”), a rescue plan was quickly devised.
Importantly, the rescue plan did not involve cutting back on services – despite recurrent rumours to the contrary.
Instead of cutting back on services, the plan envisaged cutting back on management and other staff, and reorganising the way various things were done, as well as a severe dose of pay restraint.
We are now some weeks further on, and some rather strange things seem to have happened.
It has become clear that, while the re-engineering of various activities is going forward, the Department of Health is not currently intending to lend the money that the hospital needs to make the redundancy payments that would be involved in rapid staff reductions, and no strenuous pay restraint is in prospect.
Mercifully, it also seems clear that the hospital has found a way of making its cash flow work well enough to keep it running through coming months.
But, without the money to fund redundancies and without severe pay restraint, there seems little prospect of DCH being able to get its finances on to a basis that is sustainable in the long term.
The absence of the pay restraint is not altogether surprising. It is, at present, really very difficult for an individual hospital to change the pay of those employed in it, because of the way the national pay bargaining system works.
But the redundancies are different matter. It is certainly possible for a hospital like DCH to buy people out of their jobs by making the required redundancy payments.
So now we come to the really interesting question about these latest developments: why is the Department of Health not financing the redundancies?
Long experience in Westminster and Whitehall has not actually made me a cynic. My impression is that when things go wrong, it is more often because of cock-up rather than conspiracy – and, contrary to the current fashion, I don’t generally assume that ministers, even though they are my political opponents, are motivated mainly by low cunning.
But I have to say that, in this particular case, I do wonder whether the Secretary of State for Health, one Mr Andy Burnham, may have decided that he preferred not to see redundancies occurring this side of a purely arbitrary date like 6 May.
Could this really be the case?