£65m to be spent on Midlands hospitals after Stafford Hospital failure

Around 200 staff working at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton will be transferred to Cannock Chase Hospital.

The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust will take control of Cannock under sweeping proposals that will see the scandal-hit Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust dissolved.

Stafford Hospital will lose its maternity unit, which currently delivers 1,800 babies a year, while major surgery and children's inpatient care will be moved elsewhere.

Its critical care unit also faces being downgraded under plans drawn up by administrators called in to create a blueprint for the future of services in Staffordshire.

The running of Stafford Hospital will be passed to the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent.

David Loughton, chief executive at New Cross, revealed an investment programme worth up to £59m was planned if the proposals are rubber-stamped by health secretary Jeremy Hunt before the end of the year.

An £8m extension of Wolverhampton's maternity unit and £28m rebuild of its accident and emergency department will be needed to cope with rising demand, Mr Loughton said.

And between £8m and £23m will be spent refurbishing Cannock Chase Hospital to bring it back up to date after years operating well below capacity. Meanwhile, chiefs at Walsall Manor Hospital today revealed fresh plans to invest £6m extending the site's maternity unit to deal with up to 700 extra births a year from the Cannock area, as a result of the closure of Stafford's department. Wolverhampton will also deliver babies from Staffordshire, along with UHNS in Stoke.

Under plans first revealed by the Express & Star, elective surgery will move from Wolverhampton to Cannock, with a free direct shuttle bus introduced to transfer patients. A&E services at Stafford will continue as they are at the moment, running only between 8am and 10pm each day. Children will no longer be treated as inpatients at Stafford and will have to be transferred to other hospitals by ambulance if they come to A&E and need to be admitted.

West Midlands Ambulance Service will also receive an extra £1.2m to help with the added ambulance transfers that will be needed between hospitals. The final cost for all the changes could be as high as £302.8m. The Wolverhampton trust put together a bid to take over some of the services provided by Mid Staffs. Walsall had also hoped to win some services, and bosses there said today they would persevere until Mr Hunt reached a final decision.

Mr Loughton said: "We were asked to become involved and as far as we are concerned it is a win-win situation for Wolverhampton and the people of Cannock.

"We have major capacity issues and to be able to use Cannock for elective surgery is a good move as it gives us the room in Wolverhampton to deal with the more complicated things from Stafford. As far as Cannock is concerned, I believe local people will be relieved and quite happy that the hospital will be near to full capacity."

Special administrators were brought into Mid Staffs earlier this year because of mounting financial problems. The trust has needed to be bailed out to the tune of £21m a year.

The administrators, Professor Hugo Mascie-Taylor and consultants Alan Bloom and Alan Hudson, have made 14 recommendations fo Mr Hunt to decide upon, following a public consultation starting next week. At a heated public meeting last night, Stafford MP Jeremy Lefroy told campaigners he would fight alongside them for maternity, critical care and paediatrics to be retained at the town's hospital.