Thousands of campaigners took to the streets of Canterbury today to urge health chiefs to stop cutting services.

The organised march from Dane John Gardens went around the back of the city centre and up the High Street.

It featured banners, whistles and megaphones with people outraged the city’s Kent and Canterbury Hospital could lose all of its specialist services.

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Ken Rogers, chairman of Campaign for Health in East Kent (Chek) who organised the march, led the way.

He said: “We’re here to raise the profile of what may be happening at the acute hospitals in east Kent.

“We have a fear that we might be losing the Kent and Canterbury Hospital to be downgraded once again to a cottage hospital which they tried in 2000 but we successfully fought against and won in 2002.

“People are here to support Chek in their fight to not only get those services back in east Kent but in the future to have a new hospital built - with acute mental health beds, social care and very importantly a medical school built along side which will train all these missing consultants that we can’t get and the GPs that we have a shortage of locally.”

He added: “We’ve brought the march during an election so that people can make their mind up about what they want their elected MPs to fight for in parliament.”

From start to finish, campaigners chanted ‘Don’t slash, don’t trash, don’t privatise our NHS’, ‘They say cutbacks, we say fight back’ or ‘Save K&C for you and me’.

Among the activists were nurses, doctors and children like six-year-old Iver Sachs.

Mental health nurse Coral Lines was standing up for other nurses who are tired from the extra travelling prompted by removing A&E services from K&C some ten years ago.

She said: “Staff from Canterbury now have to travel a long distance to assess these people.

"QEQM and William Harvey are overwhelmed. Staff are exhausted and it has an environmental impact.”

She continued: “There’s 100,000 students during term time in Canterbury and they’re without their families and can be accident prone. They [health chiefs] need to place services that these sorts of people can access.

“Plus they’re proposing to build hundreds of new homes here. We need infrastructure and a full range of services for people here.

“Access means survival. If you don’t have access, you don’t survive.”

Dr Jim Appleyard was a consultant and paediatrician at Kent and Canterbury Hospital for 27 years.

Now retired, he said the NHS needs to reconfigure the services sensibly.

He said: “In 1971 when I first arrived, the aim of the regional hospitals was to make Canterbury the comprehensive hospital - that was their strategic view.

“Before I retired, we went through a consultation and health chiefs ignored all of our advice.

“They’ve gauged out the centre and put two hospitals on the wings - it’s nonsense.”

Nurse Candy Gregory travelled from Ramsgate to make a stand against the privatisation of the NHS.

She said: “We’re end up going down the American route where you have to pay to see your GP and we will all suffer.

“We have to be a voice for people.”

Health bosses are looking to cut 300 beds across Kent and Medway and the nation faces a desperate shortage of GPs.

Half of the junior doctors at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital are set to be transferred to others within the trust after it was ruled there were not enough consultants to adequately supervise their training.

The east Kent health trust has reiterated that service changes - including moving cardiac and stroke provision to Ashford - are only temporary.

Mr Rogers continued: “I think public opinion makes an awful lot of difference.

"If we can get the power of the public people, those writing letters to their MPs, to the CCG and the hospital to make a difference - I bet you we’ll win.

“It is our NHS after all and all these people own the NHS and they’re fighting to keep their services.”