THE Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust once again finds itself having to fight claims that its acclaimed Silver Star Unit is for the chop. Yet it is a storm in part of its own making.

Yesterday, it was extremely difficult to get any certainty on what is or isn’t going to happen.

The unit, for mothers experiencing high-risk pregnancies, deals with an average of 1,000 births a year. But, like last year, it is being ‘moved’ from its position on level six of the maternity unit to be ‘re-located’ a floor down among the more general maternity services over the summer.

And, like last year, the Silver Star Charity, set up by parents to fundraise for the unit, fears it will ultimately be subsumed into general maternity services and specialist facilities it has funded would lie redundant. That would, they say, put mums’ and babies’ lives at risk.

The trust is this year blaming a lack of midwives for the move.

Yet last year it claimed it was in part because birthrates dropped over summer – something it is not relying on now as a reason.

That calls into question what we are being told and the ORH was unable to answer our queries to give any certainty about Silver Star’s future in its current form.

It needs today to fully tell the public what will happen, be it good news or bad.

Many worried mums-to-be deserve that.