`“MUCH-MALIGNED” hospital bosses say they are the only ones who can guarantee the future of smaller community hospitals.

Health experts want to dissolve the Worcestershire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust and set up a new organisation in its place to run both mental health services in Worcestershire and the county’s five community hospitals in Malvern, Evesham, Pershore, Tenbury and Bromsgrove.

Leaders at NHS Worcestershire, the organisation which holds the purse strings for all healthcare in Worcestershire, have submitted a draft of this preferred option to the Strategic Health Authority, the regional arm of the Department of Health in the West Midlands.

But leaders at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, addressing a board meeting, said they had been overlooked and were better placed to run the community hospitals.

They also want to run specialist nurses, breast screening and other health services after NHS Worcestershire was told by the Government that it must only pay for services not provide them.

Both Conservative Mid-Worcestershire MP Peter Luff and Harriett Baldwin, Conservative parliamentary candidate for West Worcestershire, have said they do not want the acute trust to take over community hospitals. But Phil Milligan, the acute trust’s chief operating officer, said it had the support of a significant proportion of GPs, particularly in Evesham where they had been asked to help set up a “mini medical assessment unit”.

He said: “We are going to need to reduce costs in the system. By the joint working of the acute trust and the community hospitals we have more opportunity to achieve that successfully.

“We are the only organisation to have said very clearly to the primary care trust ‘we guarantee the future of community hospitals’. We want to build on their successes and develop more activity in local areas.”

Mr Milligan said that with the acute trust in charge there would be increased number of consultant clinics at community hospitals so people do not have to travel out of their local area to Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester or the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch. He also said the trust was committed to making sure patients had more opportunity to be cared for at home or as close to home as possible.

Chief executive John Rostill said: “We are as an organisation much-maligned. What people should do is listen to what we say and see what we do, not concentrate on what has been done before by our predecessors or believe what people say is necessarily true.”

The proposal agreed between NHS Worcestershire and the SHA is expected to go out to public consultation in May.