LOCKED in an enduring battle against seemingly intractable hospital waiting lists, the NHS adopts an intriguing initiative in East Lancashire that might, on a wider scale, ease the problem - by providing round-the-clock care for patients in their own homes.

True, the scheme launched by the CommuniCare NHS Trust is limited and only has funding from the East Lancashire Health Authority for a five-month trial period, but its potential is exciting.

For not only does it promise to ease pressures on bed space, it also offers patients who prefer to stay at home the choice of doing so and removes from them and their family many of the stresses that a stay in hospital entails.

And perhaps the greatest value of this scheme would be found particularly in winter when an occurrence such as a flu epidemic can send hospital admissions - most often of more-vulnerable elderly people - spiralling to the level where patients end up being kept on trolleys in corridors for hours. But it is not just as a useful release for the baleful blocked-beds syndrome or as a helpful influence on waiting lists that the Critical Care all-night district nursing service launched by CommuniCare has promise. It is also a humane system that it has evident benefits in the form of more-personalised and more concentrated nursing care than patients might receive on a busy ward where high levels of demand are placed on staff.

Obviously, on the scale that scheme is being run at present - staffed by two on-call sisters and two auxiliaries of the district nursing service - it can only offer a restricted benefits to the NHS and patients. But this trial deserves to be observed with interest by health service chiefs at national level and have its potential assessed for easing the strains on mainstream care across the country - by keeping people out of hospital when they can be treated at home and prefer to be.

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