THE widow of Battle of Britain fighter pilot Vernon Simmonds is writing to the Prime Minister in a bid to stop the UK's last tri- service military hospital from closure.

Shirley Simmonds, from Burley in the New Forest, wants other people to follow her example.

Commanding officer Capt James Campbell will hand over the Royal Hospital Haslar in Gosport to Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust at a special flag-lowering ceremony on March 30.

The hospital will then stay open providing jobs for the three per cent of military medical personnel currently employed there until 2009, when services provided there are due to move to an extension at Queen Alexandra Hospital, Cosham.

Mrs Simmonds, 88, whose late husband Vernon flew Hawker Hurricane fighters in the summer of 1940 and who died in February 2005, said: "I would like the people of Bournemouth to write to the Prime Minister and say they want the military hospital kept open."

She also wants people to add their names to an internet petition and express their concerns to their MPs.

"We send them to war and we don't look after them afterwards, and I think that's really terrible," she said.

"I'm absolutely appalled. I was so upset about our troops being sent to war. We have got to put military men in separate wards because civilians do not know what they've been through.

"Nowadays you don't know who your enemy is and they go through a lot of trauma."

But Roger Eustis of the Defence Medical Education Training Agency stressed: "It's not going to close at the end of March."

He said casualties usually go to University Hospital Birmingham, which has five separate hospitals.

There are also five MoD health units linked to NHS hospitals in the UK at Portsmouth, Plymouth, Frimley Park and North Allerton, plus the special military facility at Headley Court.

Injured personnel with particular medical needs are moved to NHS hospitals with specialist treatment centres, he said.