A SENIOR clinician has reassured that downgrading a maternity unit to be led by midwives rather than consultants would still deliver a safe and valuable service to local people.

Enhanced consultant-led operations for maternity, emergency and children’s services could be created at Worcestershire Royal Hospital as part of a cost-saving shake-up of the health system.

This would see the same services downgraded at the Alexandra Hospital, Redditch, to deal with only less serious cases.

If the plans go ahead, the maternity unit at Redditch would only be able to deal with “normal” births, with women deemed as high risk, such as those with pre-eclampsia or high blood pressure, being dealt with at Worcester or elsewhere.

Board members at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the Alexandra and Worcestershire Royal Hospitals, were quizzed over the safety of the proposed arrangements by former county consultant Howard Eeles.

He said that a midwifery-led unit at Kidderminster was closed several years ago because it was deemed unsafe as it was too far from a consultant-led unit.

“If the consultant-led unit at Redditch is to close, how can this proposal be accepted as safe when the distance to Worcester is similar,” he added. Mark Wake, the trust’s chief medical officer, told him birthrates have increased and midwifery practices advanced since then and that other similar midwifery-led units have been successfully introduced around the country.

“This is very much the clinical preference but also an option that is favoured by the public,” he said. “It is a question of being careful about case selection. It was put to me recently by an experienced midwife that the type of ladies who would expect to deliver in these units are an extension of home births.”

He added: “We firmly believe in a centralised obstetrics unit being best for high-risk cases.”