The price of NHS balanced books!

Cllr Andy Morgan, Conservative Group Spokesman for Health, today joined Health collegues in charging Patricia Hewitt, Minister for Health, with plundering public health budgets and slashing back on education and training, in a bid to balance the NHS books.

The "price of Patricia" was spelt out as the Government unveiled the latest National Health Service accounts following months of financial crisis and service cuts.

As it emerged that the NHS ended the financial year with a surplus of more than £600 million - achieved by a series of drastic service cuts, redundancies, ward closures, and the switching of funds from training budgets Cllr Morgan said: "The Government knew they had to bring the NHS back into the black. But instead of tackling the underlying problems of unfair funding and rising costs, ministers went for indiscriminate cuts."

With one in five NHS bodies still crippled by deficits, amounting to more than £900 million, he protested: "Cutting education and training, and plundering public health budgets is not the way to manage the future of our NHS. No other business would be run on boom and bust and neither should the health service."

Cllr Morgan added "The NHS has been financially mismanaged by the Government to such an extent that services are being restricted. Patients were told they couldn't have operations until the end of the financial year; 38,000 NHS jobs have been lost, PCTs have had their budgets cut to pay for others stuck in deficit, and almost 9,000 beds have been closed.

"Yet the Government parade this surplus as a good news story. Well it is not good news for NHS staff and patients who will inevitably pay for it in the years to come and it is not good news for Bolton where we have suffered our own job losses and ward closures”.