TODAY your Evening Star pledges to carry on its fight for Ipswich Hospital.On behalf of the anxious people of east Suffolk who are worried that current healthcare policy will ultimately leave them with a second-class service, the Star is campaigning for only the best for the Heath Road site.

TODAY your Evening Star pledges to carry on its fight for Ipswich Hospital.

On behalf of the anxious people of east Suffolk who are worried that current healthcare policy will ultimately leave them with a second-class service, the Star is campaigning for only the best for the Heath Road site.

Last year saw Sir Bobby Robson join the Star, clinicians, patients, charities and politicians in calling for head and neck cancer surgery to be saved at Ipswich Hospital - a plea which was rejected by health bosses.

This year the Star revealed secretive changes to heart attack care and our stories brought about a review of the policy's safety and gained a pledge to begin to work towards providing top emergency heart care at the hospital.

Today we will launch an electronic clock on our website, counting down the months, days, hours and minutes until Ipswich gets its own specialist heart attack centre and the people of the town finally have the same chance of survival as those living elsewhere.

Also this year the Star told of concerns about plans to scrap pancreatic cancer surgery at Ipswich Hospital and of medics' frustration over changes to sexual health services and diabetes contracts, which saw the hospital lose out.

Now we can reveal that more than 100 consultants at the hospital are so concerned about the series of changes that they have signed an open letter to health chiefs, calling on them to set out a vision for its future.

Star editor, Nigel Pickover, said: “There is no more important issue facing Ipswich at the moment than the future of the hospital.

“We will continue to fight passionately for it to maintain the top services, so it continues to attract the outstanding calibre of medical staff that it is rightly so proud of.”