Campaigners have called on senior health managers to resign after controversial plans to downgrade a hospital maternity unit were put on hold.

Proposals to provide midwife-led maternity services at Eastbourne District General Hospital and full consultant-led facilities at the Conquest Hospital in St Leonards are now at risk of being thrown out.

It follows the decision by the East Sussex health overview and scrutiny committee to refer the proposals to Health Secretary Alan Johnson.

In East Sussex Downs and Weald and Hastings and Rother Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) insist on pressing on with their plans for the shake up, the whole process will be looked at by an independent review panel.

Campaigners had pressed for the existing full services to be kept on both sites and have hit out at the PCTs for not including this option at the start of a public consultation into the proposed shake up of services held last year.

East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs both hospitals, has also been criticised.

At a hospital trust board meeting this week, Liz Walke from the Save the DGH campaign, said: "I would like to ask each board member to consider their position.

"Those who have continued to push through single siting maternity should be removed from post forthwith and those who allowed this to happen should consider their positions very carefully.

"You are accountable and by allowing this proposal to go ahead which would result in almost certain loss or damage to life, was incomprehensible."

Ms Walke has also called on the boards of the PCTs to step down.

*Hastings MP Michael Foster has spoken of his concerns about the decision to refer the plans to the Department of Health and said it was putting services at the Conquest at risk.

He said: "I do, of course, realise the strength of feeling among those who represent the Eastbourne area and I have said that it is important that parents and babies in Eastbourne should not be abandoned.

"What I am not prepared to accept, however, and what is reopened by this review, is the respective merits of whether a single site consultant-led service should be in Eastbourne or Hastings.

"I do not understand why those who seek to represent the Hastings and Rye area should put at risk a decision that had already been taken and which safeguarded the service for our local residents.

"I do not understand why they continually claim that the case for Eastbourne is of equal value to the case for Hastings. It is not.

"It is, of course, possible that as a result of the committee's decision, the final outcome will be a two site solution.

"However it is also entirely possible that if the PCTs are adamant about a single site option, then a review might result in the single site in Eastbourne, with Hastings abandoned.

"What it certainly means is a period of uncertainty, not now knowing for sure whether we retain our maternity service in Hastings or not."

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