ALL the Cirencester area GPs working at the town's hospital are to have their contracts terminated within weeks.

The jobs of three or four others working within the hospital will go at the same time.

And unless a viable new method of running the hospital can be found before February 1 it could end up, as one GP has forecast, as "a limited set-up, shutting down completely at night."

If matters reached that stage, he added, it meant the Accident and Emergency department would be severely down-graded to a casualty unit for minor injuries.

The doctor, who asked not to be identified, was one of nearly 30 who attended an emergency meeting last week supposedly to hear a package of proposals prepared by the new Cotswold and Vale Primary Care Trust, which will take over from April 1.

"We all went there to try to sort out some system to help the hospital," he said. "We turned up only to find out that we are all being sacked, either on February 1 when the junior doctors are removed, or on April 1 when the financial year has ended."

He said it appeared salaries which would be saved would be used to put in place "a very limited set-up" which would see most of the hospital's 96 beds taken up by geriatric patients, or patients recovering from treatment elsewhere.

"A&E would be severely down-graded, and all acute admissions would be halted because there would be no doctors overnight," he said.

Clinics currently held at the hospital by those GPs whose contracts were to be ripped up could also suffer.