HANDS off our accident and emergency services.

That was the message from more than 800 protestors who filled Bishop Auckland’s Market Square on Saturday.

Banner-waving protestors cheered as speaker after speaker denounced proposals to strip Bishop Auckland General Hospital of its accident and emergency department and acute medical services.

The scale of the opposition to plans to concentrate acute medical services at Darlington Memorial Hospital and the University Hospital of North Durham, in Durham City – at the expense of Bishop Auckland – were a direct challenge to proposals which are the subject of a public consultation.

Speakers also denounced the consultation as a sham and urged County Durham Primary Care Trust and County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust to go back to the drawing board.

Officials were warned that the proposal to replace Bishop Auckland’s accident and emergency department with an urgent care centre will mean many patients having to travel much farther to have emergency treatment.

Protestors say this will put lives in jeopardy, particularly people from rural areas such as Upper Weardale.

Clive Auld, spokesman for the town’s Save Our Hospital (SOH) campaign, which organised the event, told the crowd: “Thank you very much for coming to show your disapproval.

It is tremendous.”

“People from Bishop Auckland are not going to allow the trust to decimate what we have here, because that is exactly what is happening now.”

Helen Goodman, MP for Bishop Auckland, said: “We are here to defend a very important NHS principle – everybody should have equal access to healthcare.”

She accused the trust officials of being “arrogant” in telling her that the majority of people in the county were in favour of the proposals when 13,000 people had signed a petition opposing the changes.

“This is like something from the Soviet Union, 50 years ago,” she said.

County Durham MEP Fiona Hall said: “We have all been badly let down and we need to work on this together. We need prior consultation, not making decisions first.”

She said she would take this up with the trust, the strategic health authority and the Government.

John Redman, headteacher at Cockton Hill Infants School, was cheered when he told the crowd: “We want it to have more services, not less.”

Mr Redman said it was unacceptable to expect children in pain to have to endure being transferred to Darlington or Durham.

Brian Myers, chairman of Greater Willington Town Council, warned that people face “a hard fight to retain the decent services we all worked so hard to secure”.

Valerie Dryden, the former chief officer of the now disbanded South-West Durham Community Health Council, accused the trust of drawing up plans to downgrade Bishop Auckland as long ago as 1996.

She said she warned in a press release to The Northern Echo at that time that “we could end up with the most expensive cottage hospital in the country”.

The hospital trust insists that the changes are necessary to ensure that high quality and safe services are offered to County Durham residents.

It says plans to use Bishop Auckland hospital as a centre for planned surgery and for rehabilitation will increase the use of the £67m hospital, which opened six years ago.