MAIDSTONE Hospital is facing its biggest upheaval in four years with proposals that could mean key services axed.

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust wants to strip the hospital of its maternity unit, close the children's ward and treat serious bone injuries 17 miles outside the County Town.

The proposals will go out to public consultation later this month.

Trust chiefs claim the changes are essential to protecting services. Failure to act, they claim, will put in doubt its ability to provide orthopaedic and women's and children's services in future.

Chief executive, Rose Gibb, said: "We will always have two vibrant acute hospitals at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, each with emergency care centres providing general accident and life saving services for the local population.

"We will have a full range of in-patient specialist care in units at either hospital and a full range of outpatient services at both hospitals.

"However there is a need to modernise and improve, ensuring high quality care for patients."

The bare facts, however, suggest that for people living in the Maidstone area, the impact of the changes will amount to a deterioration in service.

Four in five births will, if the trust has its way, take place at a new specialist unit at Pembury Hospital. In 2003 2,600 babies were born at Maidstone Hospital.

That will fall to around 500 births for mothers who choose to have their child born at a proposed birthing centre staffed by midwives handling low-risk births.

In 2003 1,483 people had their bones fixed at Maidstone Hospitals following serious accidents or falls. From 2006 many of these operations could be switched to the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells.

Children's services will focus on day care treatment, with specialist care once again switching from 2010 to the new Pembury Hospital.