PUBLIC outrage alone should tell officials at the East Lancashire Health Authority that their pulling the plug on funding for two community nurses helping women with breast cancer is a big mistake.

For, unlike them, people don't regard these part-time nurses, or the £26,000 for their wages, as a luxury.

They see them as vital.

But, thus far, the health chiefs have been mealy-mouthed about the situation they have created.

There is just one full-time nurse left running the breast care service.

Yet breast cancer is killing two women every week in our community - while life-saving education and advice about the illness that these axed nurses provided is withdrawn because the bureaucrats say it is "not a priority." They say they are going to provide a new service but they give no indication of when that is likely to come into effect.

Now, the watchdog Community Health Council is making a last-ditch bid to make them get their priorities right and scrap this penny-pinching cut.

They better had.

And if they cannot find this chicken-feed sum to put these nurses back on the job, then let them fund them by having one fewer grey suit employed in their ivory tower.

Patients are the priority.

And if our health chiefs refuse to see that, the CHC should go over their heads and appeal directly to the new health minister Frank Dobson for the cash and the compassion that the East Lancashire Health Authority is so mean with.

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