LABOUR’S candidate for Bishop Auckland has described plans to spend £20m on expanding A&E facilities in Durham City five years after closing a brand new emergency department in Bishop Auckland as “a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

Helen Goodman, who was the town’s MP until Parliament was dissolved, said it made no sense to close down facilities in a relatively new hospital and then develop new facilities in a new building elsewhere.

She said the plans showed that predictions that hospitals in Durham City and Darlington would not be able to cope if the Bishop Auckland A&E department closed were correct.

Mrs Goodman called for “a comprehensive review of hospital facilities” across County Durham and Darlington to ensure the residents of Bishop Auckland were fully taken into account in future plans.

Mrs Goodman said: “Bishop Auckland people will be astonished at the proposal to spend £20million on the A&E unit in Durham City. We opposed the closure of the A&E unit at BAGH five years ago. It was obvious then that Durham and Darlington would not be able to cope.”

She said she was also concerned at the future of the remaining Urgent Care Centre at Bishop Auckland General Hospital and was seeking a commitment from the NHS to keep it open.

“If they do close it down it will only intensify the problem,” she added.

Mrs Goodman has also written to Councillor Joe Armstrong, chairman of Durham County Council Overview and Scrutiny Committee asking him to take up some of the issues she has raised.

Bishop Auckland General Hospital cost £67m when it opened in 2002.

Since opening Bishop Auckland General Hospital progressively lost its consultant-led maternity unit, its consultant-led paediatric and acute surgery service.

Because of the loss of acute surgery, ambulances were instructed to take road accident and other emergency trauma patients to Darlington Memorial Hospital or the University Hospital of North Durham, in Durham City.

Professor Chris Gray, medical director for County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, said: "Our plan for Durham is to provide a new type of “front of house” facility, different to the A&E services of the past to meet the challenges we face now and in the future.

"This will include an emergency department fully integrated with urgent care, which we have not had before. We intend to incorporate the multidisciplinary functions of therapy, social care, mental health support and diagnostics that are critical to managing complex patients with chronic disease and facilitating care closer to home.

"We also intend to increase our emphasis on developing facilities for timely assessment, so that we can avoid unnecessary admissions to hospital.

"Accident and emergency (A&E) departments do not stand alone. To provide effective care, they need the back-up of a full range of specialist physicians, surgeons and diagnostics 24 hours a day seven days a week to make sure that all of the expertise a patient might need in an emergency is available.

These specialist services did not exist at Bishop Auckland, and meant that emergency patients from Bishop were regularly diverted to other hospitals for specialist care.

"This is why changes had to be made in 2009. In 2015 it is unrealistic to think that we can wind the clock back to the days of small emergency departments providing very local services.

"The expectations of patients and their families is for quality care 24/7 and, more importantly than the bricks and mortar, that requires skilled professionals.

"There is a national shortage of ED staff which has become more acute in the last 10 years and we need to develop services that reflect the ambitions and aspirations of staff as well as patients.

"We continue to provide an urgent care centre at Bishop Auckland, as we promised to do so in 2009, which continues to offer a high quality swift service to around 60,000 patients each year.

"In addition, Bishop Auckland has an excellent reputation as a centre for planned care, and an increasing number of patients from across the County having operations there. We are exploring how we can enhance this role further.”