THE region's only children's burns specialist has warned that he will be forced to leave the North-East if controversial proposals go through unchanged.

Under draft proposals, children with life-threatening burns who need specialist treatment would no longer be treated in Newcastle.

Instead, they would be transferred to burns centres as far away as Manchester.

The National Burn Care Review group proposes to split care treatment for children into three levels, according to severity.

At the lowest level, some hospital units would be designated as burns facilities, treating minor burns.

Patients with intermediate burns, who make up the vast majority of child burns case, would be treated at a burns unit.

However, under the draft proposals, patients with very severe, potentially life-threatening burns, would be seen at new specialised burns centres.

Equipped with critical care beds and specialist doctors who deal only with burns care, the specialist centres would be set up in the North, the Midlands, the South-East and the South-West.

The proposals were due to be published this summer, but they have been put back to December.

Now, The Northern Echo has learned that the proposals will be published in the spring, with a three-month period of public consultation next summer.

If they go ahead, the region's leading children's burns expert has said it would leave him no choice but to leave.

Steve Jeffery, a consultant plastic surgeon at Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary, revealed that he would leave the region unless the proposals were changed.

"I would move and the North-East would not have a paediatric burns surgeon," he said.

But Mr Jeffery said he believed the region had a strong case for retaining a specialist paediatric burns unit and was confident that the people of the North-East would take full advantage of any public consultation on the issue.

Mr Jeffery said he was particularly concerned at the poor transport links between the North-East and the North-West.

He said: "If there was a major house fire in the North-East, the parents would be in Newcastle and the children would be in Manchester. That is not good.

"We would like them to change their minds."

Shirley Alexander, deputy chairwoman of the Newcastle Hospitals Patient and Public Involvement Forum, who has called for a campaign to block the proposed burns treatment changes, said: "We are awaiting the consultation documentation, hoping that things will be favourable for the North-East."

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: "The National Burn Care Group plans to have proposals about how burn care can be improved across the country by spring of 2006."