IN YET another trailer for the nurses' pay award that Health Secretary Frank Dobson is to announce next month comes the disclosure today that they are to be made not just a special case, but an extremely special one.

For it is claimed that the Pay Review Body, whose recommendations Mr Dobson is committed to accepting, wants to give senior nurses a 4.7 per cent increase and newly-qualified ones a rise of 11 per cent - more than four times the rate of inflation.

Setting aside the thought that this speculation might be assisted by a troubled government anxious to leak some feel-good into the political system, there is no doubt that, if true, the increases would be welcomed as much by the public which holds the nurses in high esteem as by the profession.

And there is a a real need to restore morale and recruitment when the NHS already has a shortage of 8,000 nurses and will need to recruit 15,000 in the next three years.

The extra £1,400 a year that newly-qualified nurses would get may also help to stem this staffing crisis by restoring the status of nursing not only by putting them of a level with newly-qualified teachers, but also as an indicator that a Labour government is not prepared to allow their value and standing to erode.

And all that will be stressed by the pay rise, the first above-inflation increase nurses will have had for four years, being paid in one go, possibly ending altogether the phasing in of pay rises, for which Mr Dobson previously had to apologise to an angered profession. But even if this inflation-busting departure does not provoke pressure from across the rest of the public sector for similar treatment, there will be an inevitable downside to it that the government may seek to play down or dump in the laps of the NHS managers - that of the cost to the health service.

For if, as reported, the government is yielding to Treasury pressure and paying for this increase, not out of the Exchequer, but from existing NHS budgets, then the pressure will fall on clinical services.

That is because, trammelled year after year with making "efficiency savings" - the sort that shut wards and lead to winter bed crises - the scope NHS bosses have for making savings that do not hit patient services have greatly diminished.

Investing in NHS staff is fine, but hitting patients at the same time has potential for a deferred political backfire if it leads to more sick people stuck on trolleys in hospital corridors or having their operations delayed.

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