NHS-WATCHERS are usually witness to health care in their communities being beset by spending cuts and stretched resources - but today, against that trend, East Lancashire sees a massive money boost on the hospitals front.

For a £15million improvement project is set to launch Burnley General Hospital into a new era of providing better care across a whole range of services - as the long-awaited Phase Four scheme gets the go-ahead and upgrades to many other services are set to take off.

It's a super tonic for the the NHS in Burnley and its users. And that's not just in terms of the improvements that the four-year project will bring - everything from brighter, revamped wards throughout Burnley General to new operating units and from improved out-patient facilities to better mental health services in the community.

For, in addition, the £9million Phase Four project, together with the other schemes funded by the Burnley NHS Trust that make a £15million improvement package in all, will secure the future of the hospital site.

That's a big boost for the community now served by Burnley General - as long-term health planners in East Lancashire have previously postulated that the region's hospital care in the next century might be based on just one hospital or even none at all.

This provoked fears that hospital services in the eastern sector of our region might be run down in favour of them being developed at the expanding Queen's Park Hospital site in Blackburn - and this concern was added to by the recent "federation" of some services by the two health trusts in charge of Blackburn's and Burnley's hospitals.

Those concerns are, we think, now greatly diminished. But though this major boost for health care in East Lancashire is hugely welcome, we must also greet it with a sigh of relief.

For sanction from the NHS's North West Executive for the Phase Four scheme was a long time coming and, last year, government spending curbs threatened that it might be withheld - to the extent that trust chiefs at Burnley might have had to plunge into the money market for funding, a move that would inevitably have meant that money which might have been spent on patient care in Burnley would have gone instead towards servicing the debt.

But, now that the North West NHS chiefs have delivered, that prospect has all but vanished - and, for a change, NHS users in our region are given a positive prospect rather than the familiar one of cuts.

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