BRANSFORD’S ambulance control centre is to close next week, it has been announced today.

The Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) will close at 7am on Monday when all call handling and dispatch of vehicles in Herefordshire and Worcestershire will be transferred to the EOC at Brierley Hill.

Staff, local politicians, residents and your Worcester News fought a long and hard campaign to try and save the centre, when more than 2,000 people signed a petition against the plans.

However, West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust Board took the decision to go ahead with the closure in November 2007 and move to a new integrated system with three EOCs in the region - at Brierley Hill, Stafford and Leamington Spa.

Richard Burt, Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate for West Worcestershire, said: “It is bitterly disappointing. We fought a very very strong, well-argued and determined fight to keep the centre serving the two counties but the ambulance trust, in their wisdom, decided the better option was a single service at Brierley Hill.”

Mr Burt said the public now needed to keep a close eye on performance figures.

The trust said that no redundancies were being made following the closure of Bransford.

Chief Executive, Anthony Marsh, said: “No-one is being made redundant; staff will be moving to a variety of other positions within the trust that they have chosen. These include transferring to the EOC at Brierley Hill, working on A&E ambulances, becoming part of the patient transport service and in one case working as a trainer for community first responders in the two counties.

“Once the switch has been made, there will continue to be a dispatch desk dealing exclusively with the vehicles in the two counties. This will be staffed by those staff transferring from Bransford or from the pool of staff from Brierley Hill who have been supporting Bransford for the last 12 months.”

Mr Marsh added: “During our consultation, a number of people raised concerns that all of the vehicles in rural areas would be people ‘sucked into Birmingham’. We have examined the flow of vehicles between counties since the closure of the control room in Shrewsbury and that has very clearly not happened. This proves beyond any doubt that the steps that we said we would take to ensure it didn’t happen are working.”

Mr Marsh said that no ambulance stations were closing and there was no intention for that situation to change.

The EOC at Brierley Hill has been expanded from a total of 45 work station to 75 and will be a mirror for the new centre being built at Tollgate in Stafford.

“The level of resilience between the two sites and the third in Leamington will be amongst the best of any call centre in the country,” Mr Marsh said.