Shropshire hospital consultants today spoke of the threats to clinical services at the county’s two main treatment centres.

They fear specialist services could be relocated outside Shropshire due to national directives or as a result of a failure in the county to take “difficult decisions” to protect them.

A major public consultation exercise is underway to explain planned changes to services at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Telford’s Princess Royal.

Health chiefs and leading clinicians claim changes are necessary to keep services in Shropshire and ensure they are safe and sustainable.

But a proposal to concentrate women and children’s services at Telford has already come under fire from the west of the county.

Dr Sharon Oates, obstetrician and gynaecologist, said Shropshire had lost the “more complex” gynaecological cancer surgery.

“Saying no was not enough to keep it in the county,” she said.

“We lost the service primarily because we did not serve a large enough population across our hospitals.

“We do still continue to perform the less complex operations for gynaecological cancers, to a high standard of care.”

Dr Oates added: “We have a major strength in that we offer both chemotherapy and radiotherapy services locally.

“Many hospitals of a similar size do not do this. This puts us in a good position to keep services locally, and also to attract new services as treatments and technology do change. But we have to make this happen.

“Where we have opportunities to keep services in our hospitals, even if this means some difficult decisions about how and where they are provided, then we do need to do this rather than see more patient care disappear from the county.”

Bob Diggory, consultant Upper GI (gastrointestinal) surgeon, said that five years ago Upper GI cancer surgery was removed from Shropshire “in favour” of Stoke.

“The primary reason for this relocation was a national directive to centralise cancer services, and not in anyway a criticism of the Shropshire Upper GI team who quality of care, survival rates and patient satisfaction levels were praised at each external peer review,” he said.

Mr Diggory warned: “It is therefore entirely possible that other local, high quality clinical services in our county are at risk of a similar fate.”

By Health Correspondent Dave Morris