SAVE The Grange campaigners have been promised by health chiefs that the Petersfield birthing centre will reopen.

The head of midwifery for the Portsmouth Hospital's NHS Trust, Donna Ockenden, made the pledge at a packed public meeting in Petersfield's Festival Hall last Thursday night. But she refused to give campaigners an answer to their clamour for a date. Instead she would only say that The Grange Birth Centre would open when there were enough midwives available to make it a safe option for expectant mothers.

"I genuinely believe that had we not taken the difficult and distressing decision to temporarily close our birth centres, there would have been a clinical incident. I don't have enough midwives to cover births across the six sites and some people will say that is a reduction and removal of choice, but I took the decision on the grounds of safety."

She said as far as she knew, no-one who had opted for a home birth since the start of July had had their request turned down.

With the closure of The Grange, Petersfield area mothers currently have the choice of a home birth or travelling to the busy Mary Rose Unit in St Marys Hospital at Portsmouth. Some have also opted to travel to St Richards at Chichester or to Winchester.

Mrs Ockenden claimed she made the decision to close the Petersfield birth centre after the service was hit hard by maternity leave and sickness in the space of two months.

Currently she said she was 24.5 full-time midwives short. Of the shortage, 10.5 were on maternity leave, scheduled to rise to 15 by October. In addition, 13.5 more were on medium or long-term sick leave.

Mrs Ockenden, together with Bill Shields, deputy chief executive of the Portsmouth Hospitals Trust, and Ian Golland, head of the Trust's Women and Children Division, faced a two-hour grilling from angry and anxious mothers who filled the Festival Hall last week. They had come to protest about the sudden closure of both The Grange at Petersfield and Blackbrook Birth Centre in Fareham.

Many were concerned that The Grange closure was linked to the £5.5m financial crisis facing the trust. They feared health chiefs were planning to cut staff numbers in the midwife service to save money.

But Mr Shields stressed the financial crisis and The Grange closure were not connected. He said that the closure had not saved the trust any money and the decision to temporarily suspend the facilities had been taken solely because of staff shortages.

At the start of the meeting, campaign leader Sarah Roberts handed health chiefs a petition signed by 4,331 people calling for the reopening of The Grange, which she said had been collected in just five weeks.

The chairman of the meeting, East Hampshire MP Michael Mates, said the last time he had chaired such a big meeting was during protests over the proposed closure of Lord Mayor Treloar's Hospital at Alton.

He said: "It shows how strongly and how upset people feel at the decision to close The Grange and the way the decision was taken." Mr Mates, who said his youngest grandson was born at The Grange where mother and baby were treated wonderfully well, added: "This decision was taken, it must be said, in some haste and the notice given was extremely short. I got two weeks notice, and that tells me all is not well in the communication within the trust."

"We want answers," he told health chiefs, "to questions such as why it happened so suddenly, why so little notice was given and why those in late pregnancy had to change their plans? We want to know that it is indeed just a temporary closure and we want a commitment that it will be reopened and would appreciate some indication as to when."

Mrs Ockenden said she had taken the decision to close The Grange and Blackbrook because they had the lowest birth rates and it was not possible to cover all six birth care sites in the area safely with the available staff.

She said she was committed to covering the maternity service in a variety of ways, including increasing hours, using the NHS Professionals bank service, temporary contracts and overtime.

But she stressed: "To the best of my knowledge, I am not saving one penny, if anything it may cost slightly more with midwives driving further to work."

But campaign leader Sarah Roberts challenged Mrs Ockenden to justify her claim that she was looking for staff.

Placing one advertisement in the midwife journal two months ago, she said "is not actively seeking midwives".

And Paul Jessop, chairman of Rogate and Rake Parish Council disputed Mrs Ockenden's claim that her actions had been made to make the service safer for expectant mums.

"When you are as far from the main hospital in Portsmouth as Rogate, the drive for a woman in labour may not be feasible, and if that is not an issue of safety, what is?" he asked.

"There seems to have been a terrific absence of strategic planning," he added. "The Grange was closed last year and no-one seems to have learned anything from that."

Ending the meeting, Mr Mates told campaigners he believed they had taken a great step forward: "We have got a guarantee that The Grange will reopen, we have got a guarantee from Donna that it will be done as soon as it is safe to do so.

"We have a guarantee that none of the financial constraints affecting the trusts will affect that guarantee, there will be no holding back on the employing of enough midwives to ensure that the two centres reopen and we get back the services we have lost. I am grateful to the trust for making these reassurances."

But Mr Mates warned the representatives of the Portsmouth Hospital Trust: "We don't want to have any of our health services managed in this way. We want notice, we want to be consulted, we want to be told and kept in the communication link so that this sort of sudden decision does not happen again – our friends from the trust will have learned that from the strength of feeling tonight."