The NHS chief responsible for plans to downgrade the Princess Royal Hospital insists he can still sleep at night.

In a personal account of his time as Mid Sussex NHS Trust chief executive written for colleagues, Roger Greene said he could not always be popular but he tried to act with integrity.

He was prompted to put pen to paper for the trust's On Call staff magazine, read by more than 400 staff, after we described him as an "axe-swinging NHS boss".

Mr Greene, who has now announced he is quitting his job, was a member of a review panel which wants to send seriously injured or ill casualty patients more than ten miles to Brighton, instead of to the PRH at Haywards Heath as at present.

Mr Greene's article was carried under the heading, "Few of us have had to face this one in our lives...what exactly does it feel like being described in the press as an axe-swinger in chief?

Mr Greene says: "Doing my job is a privilege. I have to accept that my actions won't always be popular but as long as I try to do things with integrity, always with the best interests of patients at heart, I can still sleep at night."

Mr Greene and colleagues faced a heated protest at one meeting at Clair Hall, in Haywards Heath, where an appeal had to be made for calm.

He recalls: "It isn't especially pleasant facing 600 angry people, but the only way forward is to be open and tell people exactly what the issues are and what we're trying to do in facing those issues."

Mr Green admits to irritation when he believes his views have been misrepresented, but adds: "By and large I think the local press have been very fair in their actual reporting of the issues."

It is not the first time Mr Greene has been depicted an an axe-man.

In the 1990s, the local press carried a front-page cartoon of him and then Mid Downs Health Authority chairman Martyn Long with a bloody axe during a failed campaign to save the old Haywards Heath Cottage hospital.

Mr Greene, who has spent eight years at Haywards Heath, takes over as chief executive of Worthing and Southlands NHS Trust in the New Year.

He says that seeing first-hand the improvements that services have made to the lives of patients is the highlight of his stay in Mid Sussex adding: "Against those kind of memories, the newspaper headlines don't really matter."