OFFICIALS faced a hostile reception as they tried to explain proposals to change the role of a hospital.

Executives and senior doctors told an audience at Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland, that the only way to provide safe, high-quality hospital services in County Durham was to concentrate more acute services at Darlington Memorial Hospital and the University Hospital of North Durham, in Durham City.

It means that if the proposals go ahead, Bishop Auckland General Hospital will be stripped of its acute medical services and have its accident and emergency unit downgraded to an urgent care centre.

At Thursday night’s public meeting, members of the audience repeatedly denounced the proposals, accusing officials of favouring Darlington and Durham over Bishop Auckland and betraying the population of Wear Valley.

Stephen Eames, the chief executive of the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, insisted that the plans for Bishop Auckland, which include proposals to make the hospital a centre for planned surgery and to give it a new role as a regional rehabilitation centre, would mean that more of the hospital would be in use than at present.

But Councillor Ann Golightly, who sits on Wear Valley District Council, said her experience in the previous 24 hours, when her 11-month-old grandson was taken ill and had to be transferred from Bishop Auckland to Darlington Memorial Hospital and then to the Royal Victoria Infirmary, in Newcastle, convinced her that her local hospital has already been downgraded.

She said: “As far as I am concerned, Bishop Auckland General Hospital is no more. It is a care home.”

Clive Auld, a spokesman for the Save Our Hospital campaign group, which will hold a rally in the town’s Market Square from 11am today, accused trust officials of “decimating”

facilities at Bishop Auckland hospital.

He said: “It is not acceptable at all.”

Bishop Auckland resident Paul Gosling criticised the trust for not giving members of the public a third option of retaining the status quo. Both options in the trust’s public consultation involve acute services moving away from the town.

One member of the public asked why the highly rated stroke unit at Bishop Auckland was being moved.

Dr Neil Munro, a senior consultant from the trust, pointed out that more doctors and nurses were working on the trust’s stroke service than ever before and the removal of acute medicine from Bishop Auckland made the transfer inevitable.

Councillor Sam Zair, who helped found the Save Our Hospital group, was loudly applauded when he said “we owe it to our children” to fight for services to be increased at Bishop Auckland hospital rather than being taken away.

■ For more information about the proposals, go to seizing thefuture.org.uk