THE THIN end of a sinister wedge is discovered by the Lancashire Evening Telegraph today - moves to muzzle the patients' NHS watchdog.

For what is evident from the disclosure that NHS Executive - the health service's top management body - has commissioned management consultants to "review the method of resource allocation" to Community Health Councils is not just that savings are being sought, but that ways to radically reduce the CHCs' powers are also being looked for.

This is worrying and should concern everyone with a concern for standards and accountability in our health services.

For since government reforms gave the NHS a quango-type structure at local level through the setting up of trusts, the public's involvement in the running of the service has been greatly reduced. The CHCs are virtually the only official check and input that its users - and funders, let us not forget - have left.

But look is being recommended now.

They want the CHCs to move from monitoring local health services to specific projects agreed with the local health authority. Would not that compromise the CHCs' role and independence at a stroke? They want them also to move away from "information provision" to the public. Why? Is it that a less-informed public might be less aware of its rights and less inclined to complain about poor services?

They want to scale down the CHCs' work on patients' complaints. Who, then, would investigate them? The people who are the subject of the complaint?

And they even want to shut down the CHCs' offices in town centres, so that the public can only contact them by letter or telephone. Is not that just a way of making it more difficult for patients to complain?

It is little wonder that Frank Clifford, chairman of Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale CHC, comments today: "They want us to curl up in a corner and die."

Indeed, it is apparent that they do. It is evident, too, from the hatchet-job that these recommendations amount to that their authors have been briefed by NHS chiefs to regard the CHCs as an unwelcome nuisance that need to be got rid - whereas, to us with a higher regard for accountability and openness in our public services, it suggests they are as vigilant and responsible as they have a right and duty to be.

And, in a democratic society, it is outrageous that such blatant fixing and muzzling should even be considered.

We are happy to have exposed this unwholesome plot. But that is not enough - Health Minister Stephen Dorrell should stamp on it instantly and on the scoundrels who ordered it.

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