One Shropshire A&E unit and a new hospital in county health plans

Other urgent but non-life threatening conditions would be treated at a network of centres around the county.

Health chiefs said it would not be a case of keeping an A&E at either the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital or Telford's Princess Royal and closing the other. Instead, there would be a new set-up for emergency care as part of a total restructure of all health services in the county, not just the hospitals.

The proposal has been put forward by a team of about 90 consultants, GPs, nurses and other health professionals, who have come up with their "vision" for the future as the first phase of Future Fit, the restructuring programme led by the Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Groups.

Only the most seriously ill patients would go to the emergency centre, while those with problems which needed fast treatment but were not life-threatening would go to urgent care centres around the county.

No decisions have been taken yet on where either the emergency centre or any of the urgent care centres would be, or exactly what form each would take.

One option is to build a new acute hospital between Shrewsbury and Telford.

David Evans, chief officer of Telford & Wrekin CCG, said: "It's a different department, it's not what most people would necessarily conceive as an A&E at the moment.

"If you look at the activity that goes into A&E, a lot is urgent but doesn't necessarily need the full back up of the major facilities you would have in a fully-functioning emergency department.

"Hence, put a network of urgent care centres around that which provide local provision, and then the emergency department can concentrate on the real life-threatening types of cases." Dr Caron Morton, accountable officer for Shropshire CCG, said: "At the moment we have two A&E departments within urgent care and it is publicly known that they are struggling with staffing and sustainability."