A search for specialist nurses needed to keep a baby unit open has come to an end.

The hospital trust today launched a new-look service which has helped secure the future of a special baby care unit at the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath.

The team of ten advanced neonatal nurse practitioners (ANNPs) are highly trained and can provide the same care and treatment usually given by junior doctors.

Junior doctors can no longer be employed to work at the unit because the Royal Colleague of Paediatrics and Child Health stopped recognising the hospital as a training centre since 2000 as not enough patients were being treated there.

If the nurses had not been found, the special care unit would have had to close and the maternity department downgraded to a midwife-led one.

Pregnant women would have faced longer journeys to Brighton, Eastbourne and Worthing instead.

A midwife is responsible for delivering babies and has some skills in looking after newborn infants but the neonatal nurses are specialists who look after either premature or sick newborns.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is only the second in the country to develop an ANNP-led service in which the expert nurses are qualified to run the unit and provide the medical care.

Consultant neonatalogist Ryan Watkins said it had taken a long time to find the nurses because it is such a specialist role.

He said: "There is a great deal of experience needed and a lot of training involved. There are fewer than 200 practitioners in this country and we have managed to employ ten of them with two more to come.

"That is a very large percentage and we are delighted we have managed to attract them to work here.

"We advertised in Europe, Canada, America and Australia as we tried to find the nurses but in the end all those we have employed are from the UK.

"We believe this new model of care will ensure we are able to provide a safe and sustainable service for the women of Mid Sussex."

ANNP Maggie Bloom started her nursing career in 1971, is a qualified midwife and has been a sister of a department.

To become a practitioner she had to meet several criteria including doing several courses, having a degree and undergoing six months training in intensive care. She also undertook an intensive 18- month course and complete a 20,000-word dissertation.

She said: "There has been a lot of work involved but it has been worth it."