DOCTORS, consultants and a new patients group have emerged as critics of plans to change hospital services - with just a week of the consultation period to go.

Family doctors in the county have called for the Shaping Health Services (SHS) team to go back to the drawing board. They say Bucks needs one hospital on a new central site, probably in Princes Risborough.

Twenty medical consultants have signed a letter opposing suggestions that acute medicine should be on one site and acute surgery on another. They call for all acute services to be at one hospital and non acute services to be on the other.

All this comes in the wake of a 30,000-strong petition against the plans and a protest by midwives outside Wycombe Hospital yesterday.

Wycombe MP Paul Goodman also said SHS should be withdrawn.

He said: "Over the weeks the list of people and organisations opposed to the proposals gets larger. As yet there is no list of people supporting the proposals. In the light of this fact, the authorities should bow to both local people and to reasonable argument and withdraw the document."

The most controversial proposals in the document are plans to move Wycombe Hospital's Special Care Baby Unit, maternity and children's wards to Stoke Mandeville.

Buckinghamshire Patients Forum, a new official body to represent patients' views, has sent a damning response to the plans, saying there is a wide gulf between what the SHS team want and what people want, especially in the areas of women and children's services and coronary care.

They said: "It is incredible that such an important reorganisation can be recommended on the evidence in Shaping Health Services alone."

They say the lack of information makes it difficult for people to reach informed conclusions. Plans are being made up as people go along and the proposals should be put on hold.

When news of the plan originally came out a campaign group, Save Hospital Services, was set up under the chairmanship of Free Press editor Steve Cohen to fight it.

At a meeting in Marlow last week, Mr Cohen said what had started as a news story had turned, for him, into a crusade.

The campaign group is also highly critical of the lack of information put out by the trusts.

Save Hospital Services secretary David Parsons said there were good things in the document such as planned surgery, but there were still many questions unasked and unanswered and what information was available did not always make sense.

Responses are not just about the maternity and children's services but cover all the main areas addressed in the document, Women's and children, emergency care, routine ops, mental health care, chronic illness and rehabilitation services.

Buckinghamshire County Council's cabinet fears the effect of changes to rehabilitation services will have to on its own social services.

Aylesbury MP David Lidington has also criticised the lack of information.