Pensioners and nurses reacted angrily last night after it emerged that health officials had shelved plans to replace Oxford Community Hospital.

The 24-bed hospital, at the Churchill Hospital site in Headington, closed in May after a series of outbreaks of the superbug clostridium difficile.

Oxfordshire NHS Primary Care Trust, which declared the building “unfit for purpose”, said at the time that the “medium to long-term plan was to replace the hospital with a brand new facility somewhere in the city”.

However, in an apparent U-turn, the PCT has called off the search for a site indefinitely.

The decision sparked outrage among pensioners’ groups, nurses and health unions.

And, at a meeting of the Oxfordshire Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee at County Hall yesterday, dozens of people turned up to express their fears over the future of community hospital provision in the city.

Mark Ladbrooke, the branch secretary of health union Unison, told the committee he had grave concerns about the months ahead.

He told members: “Each winter there’s further demand on community beds by pensioners.

“The message to Oxfordshire’s pensioners must be – whatever you do – don’t get sick.”

Michael Hugh-Jones, secretary of Oxfordshire Pensioners’ Action Group, said: “Oxford needs its own community hospital. OxComm [the community hospital] may not have been wonderful, or state-of-the-art, but at least it was in the city.”

Four nurses who had to transfer to Witney after the closure of the hospital said they were not militant union members, but felt strongly that the city needed its own community hospital.

Two spoke to the Oxford Mail but wished to remain anonymous. One said: “At the moment, some of the patients at Witney are Oxford residents and their relatives are having to travel a long way to visit them.”

Her fellow nurse added: “We find it upsetting, because we were led to believe it was a temporary closure.”

Since May, the PCT has arranged the use of 10 beds at the Albany Care Home, in Headington, and is placing Oxford residents at every community hospital in the county to cope with the effects of the closure.

The trust’s head of commissioning, Heather Wicks, said the interim plans had proved successful but the PCT would continue to monitor the situation closely over the winter.

She said that the reduction in beds in the city had not created a backlog at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital.

East Oxford county councillor Larry Sanders told the meeting: “We have a large and growing elderly population.

“If Oxford doesn’t need a community hospital, is there any place in the county that needs a community hospital?”

The PCT will review bed-based and home-based intermediate care before deciding future commissioning plans, a move welcomed by the scrutiny committee.

However, when pressed by committee chairman Dr Peter Skolar, Ms Wicks refused to commit to providing a comm-unity hospital in Oxford in the future.