WITH a hospital trust recently out of ‘special measures’, plans to take key services away from Blackburn and Burnley and health outcomes and life expectancy worse than the national average, local voters in this election will take a close interest in party promises on the future of the NHS.

Labour’s Andy Burnham summed up his party’s pitch for votes by saying the NHS nationally was ‘on a knife-edge’ because of Tory cuts and privatisation plans.

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He says the key to reducing the pressure on East Lancashire Hospital Trust and the Royal Blackburn’s overstretched accident and emergency department is more GPs and better linkage between council social care and the NHS services.

Burnley’s MP Gordon Birtwistle blames Labour’s closure of the casualty unit at Burnley General for many of the problems.

Labour’s Pendle candidate Azhar Ali, also an opponent of the 2006 decision, is tempted to agree but pours cold water on the Liberal Democrats claim the new urgent care centre is an adequate substitute.

The one thing that unites all parties is the Lancashire Telegraph’s ‘Save our Services’ campaign opposed to an NHS England review suggesting seven specialist services could be moved from Blackburn and Burnley to ‘superhospitals’ in Manchester, Liverpool and Preston.

Mr Burnham said: “We would carefully review any such proposals.

“They have to be based on clinical grounds not cost.

“There are considerations of transport and geography that have to be taken into account before you centralise services that particularly affect East Lancashire, where I know the hospital trust well.”

He claims Labour commitment to pump an extra £2.5 billion a year into the NHS and social care, part-funded by the ‘Mansion Tax’, and recruit and train another 8,000 GPs (1,100 in the North West) and 90,000 nurses over five years will ease pressure on Blackburn’s A and E department.

Mr Burnham and county cllr Ali also blame Tory cuts and coalition changes to Labour’s much-criticised GP contract for long waiting times at family doctor surgeries and unnecessary visits to the two local casualty units.

Ribble Valley Tory MP Nigel Evans wants a Tory government moving health care closer to the patients, as with the new Clitheroe Community Hospital, and hails the saving of the threatened Slaidburn health centre as evidence the NHS and general practice are safe in his party’s hands.

He adds: “Our NHS is the envy of the world and we have excellent hospitals in Burnley, Blackburn and Clitheroe.

“I would fight further centralisation of the service to ‘superhospitals’ in Manchester and Preston because people in rural parts of East Lancashire find it hard enough to travel to services as it is.”

Mr Birtwistle is still fighting the good fight for Burnley General: “Its urgent care services is almost an A and E and has a consultant which few others do.

“I am backing a bid for a new £15 million centre for eye treatment with a new surgical unit which will make a real difference.

“The Liberal Democrats have already won £1.25 billion for children’s mental health services.

“We are committed to supporting the ‘Cinderella’ services like mental health and the Cinderella’ areas like East Lancashire that other parties ignore.”

Hyndburn UKIP candidate Janet Brown maintains her leader Nigel Farage’s 2012 suggestion the ‘free-at-the-point of delivery’ NHS should be scrapped for US-style private insurance is definitely not party policy.

But she will encounter some scepticism that eye-catching policies like scrapping hospital car-paring charges and training thousands of new nurses on the wards can be partly-financed by £2 billion from stopping ‘health tourism’ and making new immigrants pay for health insurance for five years before becoming entitled to free care.

The Green Party promises to scrap prescription charges and provide free essential dentistry with better health from better environmental policies.

Blackburn with Darwen community group One Voice’, which runs the award-winning ‘Baiter Sehat’ health campaign, sees education of both the Asian population and health professionals as the key to ‘sensitively’ tackling cultural and social obstacles to dealing with mental health issues and boosting organ donation.

Russ McLean, chairman of the Pennine Lancashire Patient Voices Group, said: “An unfair funding formula which fails to recognise the particular challenges faced by the NHS in East Lancashire has helped contribute to the problems of the hospitals trust.

“We need more co-ordination between councils and the health services, more GPs and the education of patients so they do not go to A &E when they shouldn’t or because there is nowhere to go.”

That might be music to Mr Burnham’s ears, but he adds: “The answer is not just more money for the NHS, but spending it in the right places.”