I was quite appalled to learn of a petition calling for breast cancer services to be relocated from The Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton to Haywards Heath.

Before seeking to conduct such a campaign it would have been better to establish a few facts.

Firstly, there are already breast-care services available at the Princess Royal Hospital so there is no question of Mid Sussex women being disadvantaged if the Nigel Porter Unit is replaced at the Royal Sussex.

Even if the new centre was to be provided at the Princess Royal, all patients needing radiotherapy would still have to go to the Royal Sussex since the Haywards Heath unit would not be a complete cancer treatment centre.

Modern medical thinking on cancer services is the best results are obtained by complete multi-disciplinary teams operating on the same site.

Modern centre treatment is based on a network of regional cancer centres, of which the Royal Sussex is one, where skills are concentrated to provide expertise to serve a wide area.

The Haywards Heath plan runs totally counter to that and means it is more likely the clinical outcomes would be poorer if the Haywards Heath plan were to go ahead and patients from both areas would be the losers.

The problem of poor public transport access to the Princess Royal for patients from the Brighton and Hove area is not to be lightly dismissed, especially as car ownership in Brighton and Hove is only half that of the Mid Sussex area.

Less well-off women from Brighton and Hove, who represent three quarters of the current Nigel Porter patients, would be seriously disadvantaged.

No one in Brighton and Hove ever campaigned to take away the Haywards Heath A&E department, indeed there was support from Brighton for Mid-Sussex in the battle, yet the Mid-Sussex petition seeks to take essential services away from Brighton and Hove. Is that a proper way to behave?

-Dr Desmond Turner MP Brighton Kemp Town