DORCHESTER'S flagship hospital will suffer if cancer surgery is switched to Bournemouth, consultants are claiming.

They say the loss of urology cancer surgery under a new proposal would have far-reaching effects on other services at Dorset County Hospital.

And cancer patients would have to travel up to 120 miles in a round-trip from West Dorset for treatment.

The surgeons and consultants from DCH turned out at County Hall to fight the proposal.

And they won a partial victory when members of Dorset Health Scrutiny Committee pushed the plan towards a public consultation by deciding it amounted to a major variation to services.

The proposal is to switch surgery for urological cancer - of the prostate and bladder - to the Royal Bournemouth Hospital. DCH currently carries out prostatectomies on around 35 patients a year and the RBH performs around 50.

Dorset Primary Care Trust, Bournemouth and Poole Primary Care Trust and Dorset Cancer Network want to move all the surgery to one centre to comply with national guidance.

In a report presented to the health scrutiny committee they opt for that centre to be at Bournemouth.

They state that they have already won a concession from the national Cancer Action Team to have the centre in an area serving fewer than a million people because of Dorset's high percentage of older folk.

Without that concession, operations for urology surgery would have to be done at Taunton or Southampton.

They claim all other aspects of treatment including follow-up appointments would continue at DCH.

But medical top brass squared up over which of the Dorset options would best serve the community.

Consultants and surgeons from DCH backed Jan Bergman, chief executive of West Dorset General Hospitals NHS Trust, when he said staff feared the Dorchester hospital would suffer knock-on effects from the loss of the specialist surgery on site.

He said staff were unhappy with the suggestion that Dorchester surgeons operate on their patients in Bournemouth.

He said: "Our surgeons would have to travel to Bournemouth and back.

"Many surgeons will say that it's a poor governance. The surgeons should be looking after their patients all the time and not be an hour's drive away. They should be on site."

Councillor Andrew Cattaway and Coun Philip Gausson said they accepted the proposal to move that type of surgery to Bournemouth.

But they were outvoted by the rest of the committee and the proposal will now go for public consultation.