THE tragedy that has struck little Laura Graham is dreadful enough without it and the nightmare her parents must endure being worsened in the way it is by an NHS backlog that is as lamentable as it is mystifying.

Tiny, five-year-old Laura is housebound and cannot walk after being hit overnight by a mystery illness two months ago.

At one stage she was so ill that she could not even sit up, eat or talk.

Even now, as she recovers, she is a poorly child.

Yet, although her parents Peter and Carol Graham have nothing but praise for the doctors, hospital, social workers and occupational therapist who have helped their daughter, they find she is a victim of a far less wonderful part of the NHS - that which supplies wheelchairs.

They have been told it will be up to four months before Laura gets one.

Imagine what \hardship they face this Christmas, and well into the New Year, when they find that the health service and its people, so capable of providing the latest medical techniques and high-tech care, cannot provide something as basic - and vital - as a wheelchair for a sick child.

Surely the NHS, for all the demands heaped upon it, can, on the brink of the new millennium, do better than this.

Indeed, it is the case that it had set itself the very goal of doing that by now.

As long ago as August, 1997, officials were telling us that they aimed to get the wait for a wheelchair down to just two weeks by 2000.

And, in fact, a little over a year later the East Lancashire Area Health Authority was reaping praise from health watchdogs for having cut the wait from 40 weeks to just three to four weeks. Yet, today, the health authority is contrasting the present disgraceful delay of three to four months as a "tremendous improvement" on the 40-weeks wait.

Well, it isn't an improvement - it's a slide back into new delays and one that pitches people and their families into unnecessary worry and misery.

And whatever the reason for it, the situation is simply not good enough.

We have seen all this before - with at one stage the Disablement Services Centre in Preston, which supplies NHS wheelchairs, running into a cash crisis at this time of year and the health authority having to find out about it from this newspaper.

They should find out what is going wrong there now - and if it is a question of money, they should dig urgently into the emergency reserves because for little Laura Graham and others like her this Christmas this is an emergency.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.