SOUTHEND Hospital could lose its life-saving stroke unit under the biggest shake-up of emergency healthcare in the county for decades.

One of two hyper-acute stroke units will be closed under plans to launch a specialist A&E centre serving mid and south Essex.

It comes as NHS England revealed more details of its major five-year overhaul of A&E services in a bid to stem a £430million deficit by 2020/21 and a staffing crisis which has seen hospitals frequently on black alert.

Under the Mid and South Essex Success Regime plans, there will continue to be three A&E centres based at Southend, Basildon and Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford - but they will operate at very different levels.

Only one hospital will have a full 24-hour emergency service and a hyper-acute stroke unit.

The first, most basic A&E will be an elective centre carrying out planned specialist operations and treatments only, and, with limited intensive care facilities.

This option has already been ruled out for Broomfield because its specialist burns and plastic surgery unit needs to carry out emergency surgery and have full intensive care facilities - meaning either Southend or Basildon will be downgraded.

The second will be an emergency hospital which will perform emergency surgery and take blue light ambulances only during the day.

The third will be a specialist emergency hospital with 24/7 blue light emergency services and surgery, full intensive care facilities and the hyper-acute stroke unit.

The regime is expected to reveal its proposals for where each centre will be based in mid to late October - before a public consultation in November.

Basildon Hospital, with its relatively new emergency department and the Essex Cardiothoracic Centre is widely viewed to be the most likely choice for the specialist A&E centre.

Broomfield is not believed to be putting itself forward - meaning it is likely to become the emergency hospital.

This would leave Southend taking no blue light ambulance cases, and offering only basic emergency care.

The regime is also considering plans to “consolidate” children’s inpatients wards on two sites, meaning one hospital will lose its paediatric service.

One hospital may have a specialist centre for high risk births.

Dr Ronan Fenton, medical director of the regime, said discussions are still underway.

He said: “We have been listening to local people at various open workshops in the last week. The aim is to get insight from service users at an early stage in developing options for changes.

“There are no proposals as yet, but we explain the current thinking among clinicians and ask people to think about what matters to patients and their families.

“Through the Success Regime, we now have the three hospitals working as a group. In this way, obviously we can make more of our resources by sharing corporate functions and support services, but we also have an opportunity to centralise some specialist services to provide the best possible clinical care 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”