HEALTH campaigners are lobbying for the out-of-hours GP service to return to Burnley General Hospital as part of East Lancashire's NHS reshuffle.

Patients from across the area, with straighforward late-night health concerns, have been turning up at Burnley General, on Casterton Avenue, expecting to be seen.

But the service moved to a more central location with the opening of the new multi-million pound St Peter's Health Centre a year ago.

Health chiefs are quite happy with the progress of the move and say this will continue when the accident and emergency facilities at Burnley General are replaced by an urgent care centre, by November 1.

East Lancashire NHS Trust Hospitals' patients forum is hoping that health chiefs will have a rethink.

John Amos, chairman of the patients forum, said: "There is an acceptance that the out of hours service is in the wrong place I think.

"It should be located next to the new urgent care centre at Burnley General.

"People are going to the wrong place, thinking it is at the hospital and then having to go to St Peter's afterwards, which isn't right."

But a possible stumbling block could be the extended-hours pharmacy at St Peter's, which was intentionally positioned on the same site as the out of hours service.

An East Lancashire Primary Care Trust spokesman said the out-of hours GP service was relocated to St Peter's because of its central location, the new purpose-built nature of the centre and the proximity of an extended-hours pharmacy.

The spokesman said that the out-of-hours service had been running from St Peter's for a year and had developed a strong, working relationship with the hospital's accident and emergency department, and that this would continue with the new urgent care facility.

But the spokesman added: "We will be reviewing how urgent care should be delivered in our area, partly as a consequence of the planned hospital changes coming our way.

"We know that 87 per cent of care currently delivered in Burnley Hospital's emergency department will continue to be delivered in Burnley.

"So we will be doing more detailed work to see what urgent care should be delivered there and what services should be delivered in otherlocal settings, such as our new community health centres, GP surgeries, pharmacies, and community hospitals."

An East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust spokesman added: "The new urgent care centre at Burnley General Hospital will continue to work closely with the out-of-hours service at St Peter's, just as it currently does.

"This has been in place for around a year now and has been working perfectly."

Health chiefs say the new urgent care centre will still deal with around nine out of 10 casualty patients that it currently manages, with only the most serious cases heading to the Blackburn hospital.