A CRUMBLING community hospital is due to shut next year under plans to modernise care for elderly and infirm south Durham residents.

A shake-up in services will follow the closure of Homelands Hospital, near Crook, which was agreed by County Durham and Darlington's Acute Hospital NHS Trust board last week.

Care at Homelands would be replaced by a mixture of beds in care homes and at community hospitals in Stanhope and Barnard Castle, while there would be extra funding to support people in their own homes.

Although official consultation has yet to start, a petition calling for the building to stay open is already circulating in the Crook area.

However, the board accepted that even if it spent £1m on repairs at Homelands it would still not meet modern needs.

Only one of its four wards will be open after January, when 16 elderly mentally ill patients move to a new unit at Bishop Auckland.

The 20 beds remaining will cater for elderly people who are waiting to move into homes, are in respite care or are convalescing after a stay in hospital.

Closure would mean that the £470,000 the trust spends each year at Homelands could be spent on alternative services, while a further £100,000 is being made available through the Durham Dales Primary Care Trust.

John Saxby, the trust's chief executive, ruled out building another community hospital on the Department of Health-owned site.

None of the hospitals staff would lose their jobs through the closure, he said.

"Closing Homelands will improve services for the elderly in the area. We will be able to provide an increased level of service to more people than if the money was tied up in bricks and mortar at Homelands, which is a very small facility," said Mr Saxby.

But Betty Todd, who was until Monday the chairwoman of the defunct South Durham and Weardale Community Health Council (CHC), said: "I feel that there has not been enough thought given to what happens in the future.

"The CHC kept asking what was going to happen to patients. We felt they were being forgotten."