HEALTH services across East Lancashire are set for a cash injection of more than £40,000 next year.

It comes thanks to government funding aimed at cutting waiting times and increasing patient choice.

The cash - in real terms almost £30,000 - is part of a government scheme to increase funding by more than nine per cent across the country. East Lancashire will get £461,132, an increase on funding of 9.74 per cent, or 7.06 in real terms.

The Government wants to see the money spent on reducing waiting times, especially for cardiac patients; ensuring that 90 per cent of GPs see their patients within 48 hours by the end of 2002; and giving some patients the chance to choose where and when they are treated for the first time.

Although the funding is good news for East Lancashire, by the time it is available East Lancashire Health Authority will have been abolished and replaced with a new strategic authority covering Lancashire and Cumbria.

Some of the money will also then be distributed by the Primary Care Trusts for the area.

Waiting times in casualty in Blackburn and Burnley are around the national average. Last year, 53 per cent of patients in Burnley A & E waited more than an hour to see a doctor and 98 per cent were found a bed within four hours. In Blackburn A & E, 68.5 per cent of patients saw a doctor within an hour, and 96 per cent were admitted within four hours.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn said: "I am pleased that health services in the North West will be getting an extra £511.6 million. These extra resources will help us cut waiting times for treatment and build up the local health service with more doctors and nurses.

"Today's allocations will also help us continue the fight against cancer and coronary heart disease - two of the country's biggest killers.

"But investment must be coupled with reform. This is why today we are publishing proposals that will for the first time give patients an explicit choice over where they are treated in the NHS.

"From the middle of next year, every patient in the North West who has waited for a heart operation for six months will be able to choose between hospitals, whether in the public sector, in this country or abroad, which can do the operation more quickly. The choice will be theirs."

No one from East Lancashire Health Authority was available for comment.