NHS campaigners fear plans to merge health services across Staffordshire will hit patient care as 200 hospital beds are being lost.

North Staffordshire's two primary care trusts are currently drawing up plans to treat at least 100,000 more people in the community from 2012.

The extra treatments are needed in the community because the new £400 million University Hospital of North Staffordshire will be smaller and have 200 fewer beds.

But campaigners fear those Fit For The Future plans will be hit by proposals to transfer direct patient services provided by trusts in Stoke-on-Trent, North Staffordshire and South Staffordshire to mental health service Combined Healthcare by April.

Now the campaigners have written to North Staffordshire's MPs urging them to fight a countywide merger.

North Staffordshire Healthwatch co-ordinator Ian Syme said: "We are worried that the control over local services will move south and will be diluted and that the North Staffordshire Fit For The Future initiative becomes subsumed in this change.

"We are also concerned that staff morale will go into free-fall within Combined and the health trusts and that is in the patients' worst interests.

"With all the other chaos going on in the NHS, we are very anxious that organisations will lose sight of why they exist and the patients they serve."

The Healthwatch fears have been backed by Stoke-on-Trent South MP Rob Flello, below.

He said: "There is a Government drive to rush everything through and that is where mistakes are made.

"And when it comes to something as monumental as Fit For The Future, mistakes can translate to people's lives.

"We should be looking forward to the opening of our new hospital.

"But with this Government's unseemly haste to change everything we are now talking about risks."

Officials running Combined Healthcare will not be drawn on the planned merger.

A spokesman said: "Nothing has been decided.

"What is being mooted is a single board for the whole county with separate management divisions of community health in the north and the south."

A hospital spokesman said: "We are aware of these proposals and our board will be considering them in detail."