A former Shropshire hospital boss today waded into the county’s healthcare row by revealing his own radical plans for improving patient services over the next 10 years.

David Sandbach, who was chief executive at Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital, is circulating his proposals to top NHS figures and other interested parties. Key recommendations from Mr Sandbach include:

* The county’s two primary care trusts give their full support for the building of a new maternity unit by 2014.

* The trusts put their full weight behind opening 100- plus NHS community care beds to rectify the loss of cottage hospital beds in the 1980s.

* Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust and the Orthopaedic Hospital Trust at Oswestry to relocate most outpatient facilities, including outpatient medical care, to the town centres of Shrewsbury and Telford.

*Centralise inpatient general and orthopaedic surgical services through the creation of a “super surgical unit” next to the Princess Royal A&E department.

* Primary care trust non-executives to undertake training in how to “challenge” officers effectively.

Mr Sandbach’s proposals, detailed in a 20-page paper, are a response to a series of recommendations for developing healthcare across the county put forward by a forum of the county’s top doctors and nurses.

The ultimate goal is to concentrate acute services on one site by 2020, be it at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, the Princess Royal, or in a new hospital.

Until this can be achieved, the favoured option is to downgrade the Princess Royal A&E department and transfer some acute services to Shrewsbury.

Mr Sandbach accuses the primary care and hospital trust boards of a “careless and reckless approach to wise stewardship of public funds” by showing support for this option and for what he calls is an “obsessive corporate disregard” of the demographics in Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin.

He said today: “I hope my paper will be given serious consideration and I will be delighted to sit down with any of the boards’ members who wish to discuss my document in further detail and challenge any of my reasoning.”