Anyone looking in from outside the borough would think Arrowe Park Hospital was a basket-case requiring radical surgery to make it even remotely fit for purpose.

The Care Quality Commission has carried out an inspection and ruled it must improve.

NHS regulator Monitor is investigating the hospital's £5m overspend and its Accident & Emergency unit waiting times.

Birkenhead MP Frank Field is piling on the pressure asking if Arrowe Park has become a "broken-backed" hospital.

And Labour leadership contender, shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, visited during the general election campaign to say he "feared for the future" of Arrowe Park.

Yet many of us who attend our main hospital at times of extreme need will have nothing but praise for it.

Yes, the senior management has done itself no favours in recent times.

Acquiescing to allow plans for cardio-vascular surgery to be shifted away from Wirral into Chester did nothing for their reputation.

And racking-up hospital car parking charges last week made them look grasping.

But those in the "executive suite" are not representative of the medical and general staff and self-evidently have next to no empathy with the people they are supposed to serve.

Arrowe Park Hospital is a beacon of medical excellence and we are fortunate indeed to have such a world-class facility on our doorstep.

Readers perhaps would be justified in concluding that a campaign to blacken its name is underway.

Why, who knows?

Perhaps there are Government cost-saving schemes ahead of which we are presently ignorant.

But Arrowe Park is Wirral's hospital - the place we go to at the most significant moments of our lives. And so it must remain.