Extending hand of friendship

But it has perhaps also burdened a hard-pressed and hard-working service with a culture of being more ready to find fault and created too much of an 'us' and 'them' divide between patients and healthcare providers.

Welcome, then, is the more 'friendly' patients' rights service now being extended in East Lancashire with the appointment of a new Patient Advice and Liaison Service officer for the Blackburn and Darwen Primary Care Trust.

The aim of the service is to help people cut through red tape and get the treatment they need -- and reduce the worry and confusion they may have.

The new PALS representative, Diane Weaver, backed up by another officer, joins the network of PALS employees in our region's healthcare service. The scheme has widened since the it was piloted last December, by the Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Healthcare Trust, with the appointment of East Lancashire's first officer at Queen's Park Hospital. It will be expanded further as officials of the Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale-based hospitals and primary care trusts prepare to launch a joint PALS scheme at Burnley General Hospital and the Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Primary Care Trust is poised to follow suit.

This means that the service will then cover both hospital and community-based care for East Lancashire's thousands of NHS users. But, in addition, it is the fact that patients have a friend within the system with their best interests in mind that is the welcome new departure.

For the PALS scheme not only provides information and advice, it ensures patients' problems are heard and fed back into the system to bring improvements. And in addition, it provides a kind of 'one-stop' advice service that can put patients in touch with help from social services, benefits officers and welfare groups such as Age Concern. It is a growing venture which, we are sure, will soon make its value known and appreciated.