A senior midwife has hit back against criticisms of the service.

Carol Drummond, who is in charge of all midwives at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, said rumours of cutbacks to midwife services were unfounded.

Her comments are in response to reports by community midwives that they were no longer able to go out into the community for home-births and visits because they were being kept on hospital wards.

Other reports suggested midwifery was being under-funded, leading to staffing shortages.

But Mrs Drummond, who is head of midwifery at the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust, said: "There are absolutely no cutbacks to clinically-based midwives.

"Locally we don't have a huge problem with recruitment of midwives."

She admitted community midwives had been brought in to work more on hospital wards but said hospital midwives were equally being sent out into communities to provide a more integrated service.

She said: "We are giving the community-based midwives the ability to maintain their skills on the labour wards and giving the hospital-based midwives the opportunity of going out into the community.

"We haven't completed the restructuring of the way we work so I can understand why they are perturbed. People are always uncomfortable with change and it is sometimes quite difficult."

Mrs Drummond said the number of community-based midwives had increased.

Brighton has a homebirth rate of eight per cent, the second highest in the country.

Mrs Drummond admitted the number of home visits had decreased for new mothers from every day for ten days to three times in ten days.

But she said this was making better use of resources. She said: "We want to protect and improve the homebirth rate. We need to look at a standard package for the needs of pregnant women who have no complications.

"Do they need the midwife all the time or other health care professionals when a trained midwife is not necessary?

"People take it as cutting back, but we are looking at the package as a whole so resources are used best.

"I think the future looks very positive for maternity.

"The system isn't perfect but we are endeavouring to work really, really hard to improve it.

"We are developing the service for local people and trying to do what they want but it's not easy to do it overnight."