WHEN a patient is sick, we give him or her appropriate treatment. The Royal Bolton Hospital is financially critical, but the life-saving remedy appears to be with-held.

Now, Hospital bosses say that, without a £1.5 million cash injection for clinical and support services, the Hospitals' Trust cannot ensure the level of services there.

This is a disgraceful situation when you consider that the Government has given the health authority an extra £6.7 million to spend. A small portion of this could be used to prop up Bolton hospital services like pathology, radiology and physiology, where staff are already so over-worked that efficiency is threatened. And nursing vacancies are also currently deliberately unfilled because of lack of cash.

We're not talking here about a slight dip in product quality at a factory making nuts and bolts. We are discussing services that can mean life or death to men, women and children in the Bolton area.

Everybody knows that the reason services at the Royal Bolton Hospital are stretched is that it is attracting more patients than ever.

But if they are coming here, they are not using hospital services elsewhere. Commonsense alone dictates that cash should be re-allocated to where it is needed most. We urge Bolton and Wigan Health Authority to examine the regional "books," and immediately start shifting cash towards this busy hospital.

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