TB should visit the NHS frontline and look at the mess for himself

AS the Prime Minister glibbly repeats that all's well with the NHS, perhaps he should look through today's Press Association tapes if he doesn't believe the evidence being presented to the Commons by MPs.

The plight of Suffolk is well chronicled, and perhaps Tony Blair takes little interest because he thinks it's a Tory county and Tory MPs are using it as a stick with which to beat the Government.

But today, evidence has emerged via the Press Association that other parts of England are suffering. Cornwall's main acute services hospital, the Royal Cornwall in Truro, is axing 300 of its 5,000 because of an £8.1m shortfall. Up in Greater Manchester, Trafford NHS Trust announced it was closing two in-patient wards at Altringham General Hospital because a cash crisis had made it impossible to provide 24 clinical cover at hospital.

At Questiontime in the Commons, the Prime Minister said: "No-one believes the NHS isn't better today than it was eight or nine years." That's as maybe but as the money keeps pouring in, much of it has been wasted on setting up PCTs and then scrapping them with massive management redundancy costs.

Yesterday, the NHS Chief Executive Sir Nigel Crisp was apparently sacked after admitting "structural problems are getting worse and financial problems are now being revealed."

This Government talks in soundbite headlines - 80,000 more nurses, 30,000 more doctors, waiting for cataract problems  down from 2 years to 3 months, no one waits for heart operations more than three months. 

Yes, waiting times have come down, but it would be illuminating to ask hospitals at what stage waiting lists start - from the receipt of the faxed referral from the GP, or when a patient is moved from a holding waiting list to the actual list, which could be a matter of weeks or even months.

It's difficult for those who still languish on waiting lists because of the way the figures are massaged to "give three cheers, and one cheer more" for our wonderful Department of Health and its cash provider Gordon Brown.

A rather complacent TB told opposition leader David Cameron today that Trust deficits were only 1% of the annual bill of the NHS - "but the most important thing is that 50% of the deficit is in 6% of the trusts." 

Let him come to Suffolk and see the mess for himself - but then again, that's not a good news story and he wouldn't want to be ambushed by staff, consultants and patients in a patently organised Tory plot who would all tell him that the planned closure of much loved community hospitals is an absolute disgrace.