HEALTH officials have scrapped plans for a community hospital at Heathlands to concentrate on building a hospital and health centre on the Civic Centre site in Pershore.

Heart of England Housing and Care, which owns the Heathlands site, said the 60 en-suite rooms for residential care, will now include a dementia care unit, allowing people to return from Worcester where they have been during the £2.5million re-development.

The U-turn on Heathlands, a proposal the public strongly objected to during the consultation period, came about after Wychavon District Council offered to fund re-development on either the current hospital site or on the Civic Centre site.

The Trust said the proposal to lease the Civic Centre site from the Council was now a legitimate option but re-building on the existing hospital site was not possible because of the shortage of available land.

At a Trust meeting on Tuesday, board members voted to scrap plans for Heathlands, at a cost of £80,000 to abort the project..

Trust chairman Mike Ridley said: "The Heart of England Association has been enormously helpful and co-operative during this period. It was an opportunity which should have been taken and I'm glad that it was. It is with great regret that I do make this recommendation."

Richard Whitmore, chairman of the trust's professional executive committee, said 25 beds at Heathlands would have provided room for recovering patients and taken pressure off the Worcestershire Acute Trust.

"We cannot keep saying what the downsides of our proposal are. We need a realistic view of how difficult this is going to be and we need to record it publicly. We are delaying proposals which would have increased the capacity of our health economy within a few weeks. If we don't go forward with Heathlands we still need step-down beds in this process," he said.

There will now be an extended public consultation period on the new proposal while the Trust works on a detailed business plan for the site, which will incorporate healthcare proposals across South Worcestershire, including possible improvements to services at Evesham Hospital.