A surgeon has ended his 20-year career with the NHS because of bureaucracy and decisions he claims affect patient care.

Mike Lavelle, who works at The Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, said he was fed up with a service that was "grossly over-managed" and wasted money employing "unnecessary bean-counters" instead of buying essential equipment.

The final straw, he said, was a decision to move emergency procedures to Brighton's Royal Sussex County Hospital which meant he would not be able to provide patients with follow-up appointments.

Mr Lavelle, 58, will leave his post next month.

In a letter to Peter Coles, chief executive of the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust, Mr Lavelle said he had decided to leave reluctantly and with "great sadness".

He said: "I feel I have been worn down over the past few years and have finally lost the fight to do my job to the best of my ability."

Mr Lavelle, an experienced consultant general surgeon who studied medicine at Oxford, was a rising star of the NHS and had intended to stay with the service for the rest of his career.

In 1998 he won the Cutlers' Prize gold medal for surgical innovation after designing an illuminated dissector to be used in abdominal surgery.

In his letter to Mr Coles, leaked by a member of the public without Mr Lavelle's knowledge, the consultant criticised delays in getting patients to theatre and bed shortages which have meant private clinics have been paid to perform surgery to keep waiting lists down.

He said the Government had pilloried consultants for long waiting lists, which was "demotivating and demoralising".

He complained that the Princess Royal was being run from Brighton, that surgeons were given little say over staff appointments and there was little communication between managerial departments.

Mr Lavelle warned that the standard of care for patients from Mid Sussex would decline when operations were carried out in Brighton because the Royal Sussex was already "bulging at the seams".

Mr Lavelle, who leads the Mike Lavelle Jazz Group, said he had recently been visited by a "service improvement facilitator" collecting data about the Royal's endoscopy unit, where staff were working in cramped conditions with out-of-date endoscopes to investigate stomach and intestinal complaints.

He said: "Everyone knows we need a second room up and running and some new endoscopes, but instead we employ these people to go around interfering and collecting inaccurate data.

"A year's salary for this person would probably buy a new colonoscope and we could have a new scope every year for five years."

In his reply, also leaked, Mr Coles admitted the consultant had made some good points.

Managerial structures, he said, were driven by a national desire to get the best value for money from an expensive and high-profile public service.

He praised Mr Lavelle as an excellent, hardworking surgeon, held in the highest regard.

The trust said the resignation was a private matter but many of Mr Lavelle's views were "historic".