TWO new medical centres are to be set up in Stoke-on-Trent to assess hundreds of emergency patients currently being sent to A&E by family doctors.

They will be created in Burslem and Longton within a year as the latest bid to take pressure off the over-stretched accident unit at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire.

Ambulance crews will also be trained to decide in patients' homes whether to take the sick to the new centres or hospital.

But GP leaders are not fully convinced by the idea and have demanded more clarity over which conditions should be referred where.

Without that, they warn many doctors will continue to send patients to the Hartshill complex to make sure they are safely cared for.

One centre will be at the Haywood Hospital, Burslem, which has just reopened following a £35 million redevelopment.

The other is earmarked for a former day centre at Longton Cottage Hospital, which sparked protests when previous patients were moved out.

The 20-place Normacot House used to care for elderly mentally ill patients who had to be moved to four other venues on its closure in December 2007.

The new assessment centres will be staffed by nurse specialists supervised by doctors and contain state-of-the-art X-ray equipment to diagnose illnesses.

Their establishment is one of the catalogue of changes to North Staffordshire's creaking emergency care system recommended by private consultancy ATOS, which carried out an audit of why elderly people faced nightmare waits on trolleys in accident unit corridors last winter.

Its experts scrutinised the 276 patients flooding in every day, nearly half by ambulance, and estimated that half of them could have been seen just as effectively elsewhere in the local NHS.

ATOS found that some GP practices were referring many more patients to the hospital than others in the area and those with the worst record have been given extra support by local primary care trusts.

Bob Colclough, an official from the city's PCT, said: "Ambulance staff will be given extra training to examine those with non life-threatening conditions in their own homes and then divert from A&E to the two primary care assessment centres if appropriate."

PCT planning and modernisation director Tina Cookson added that the existence of X-ray facilities at the centres was crucial to making them work.

But unlike walk-in centres, they would not be available for the public to visit without a referral from a professional.

Dr Paul Golik, secretary of North Staffordshire 250-GP Local Medical Committee, below, said: "The criteria we have been given for excluding patients from being sent to them is considerable and confusing and unless that is improved, some GPs are saying they will continue to refer people to A&E.

"But the benefits are that patients will be seen relatively close to where they live and the cost will be a lot cheaper."

Changes brought in on the back of the ATOS work has already helped to reduce A&E delays to within Government targets through the summer.

One involved better supporting the YMCA, in Hanley, where PCT chief executive Graham Urwin said there had been an "alarming" number of people calling an ambulance to go to hospital.

He said: "A lot of these people were then leaving without being treated.

"By helping them access the right service at the right time instead, those calls have now dropped significantly."