What should happen to Dumfries and Galloway’s cottage hospitals?

The consultation runs until 18 August, with its findings being studied before a final decision is taken on their fate in September.

The review comes against a backdrop of significant financial pressures facing the NHS in the region and across the country.

Campaigners have argued that reopening hospital beds in community hospitals could ease the pressure on services and deliver a better rural care model.

Dr Angela Armstrong, a retired Wigtownshire GP, said: “It allows the patients to be looked after in their own community, people can go and visit them easily and their own GP can take care of them.

“That is not meaning that you go and have a major operation – they don’t do things like that in cottage hospitals.

“They look after people who aren’t yet or are never going to be able to be looked after at home.”