PENDLE MP Gordon Prentice has set up a crisis meeting with East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust over plans to scrap a 15-bed intensive care unit at Burnley General.

At a meeting next week, he will stress to trust chief executive Jo Cubbon that any plan to transfer care to Blackburn's Queens Park Hospital is a "non-starter".

Fears were raised following an accident and emergency review of facilities in the wake of the massive £113million extension at Queens Park, which will replace all Blackburn Royal Infirmary's services.

It will open next summer and the trust is considering revising intensive care services, leaving the main emergency work in Blackburn while Burnley will have a lower category service.

Already Lee Bunting, secretary of the NHS Burnley branch of UNISON, has warned that the writing is on the wall for Burnley. He believes the hospital will be downgraded to help pay for the new Queens Park development.

Ms Cubbon has floated four options as part of a review of all hospital services in East Lancashire. They are:

l Do nothing

l Build a brand new general hospital to serve the region

l Take intensive care beds from one site

l Take intensive care and high dependency from one of the two hospitals

The last two would mean some emergency and surgical patients having to go to Queens Park instead of Burnley.

But Mr Prentice, Labour MP for Pendle, is deeply unhappy and has set up a meeting with Ms Cubbon a week on Friday. He said: "I pledge to keep the 15-bed intensive care unit at Burnley General.

"The clinical services review, initiated by the trust, is floating the option of transferring the unit to Blackburn. This is a total non-starter. People fighting for their very survival can't be bussed around the county like parcel post.

"The very idea that seriously ill people in West Craven, for example, should be expected to go to Blackburn is frankly preposterous. I will tell the chief executive of the trust it is simply not on."

His Labour colleague, Burnley MP Kitty Ussher, has also launched a petition against the proposal.