THE role of those running our National Health Service is to provide the best possible treatment for patients as quickly and conveniently as possible within financial limits.

The ever-present problem is that there will never be enough cash to meet everyone's needs.

Managers have to keep within tight budgets, attract the best staff and plan carefully to minimise the wages bill for one of East Lancashire's largest employers.

With all that in mind it still seems a shameful waste that only ten of 70 nurses who have spent three years training in East Lancashire hospitals will be able to stay on - and they are likely to be people who are already on the staff anyway and had been seconded to study nursing.

The rest will presumably go abroad to places where British training is highly valued, the private sector or other parts of the country where there are vacancies.

The immediate reason is that East Lancashire Hospitals Trust is deeply in the red and just cannot afford to keep them on right now.

But only a few years ago nurses were being recruited and flown to the area from the Philippines because of a local shortage of trained staff.

What the NHS needs locally and nationally is more medium and long term planning rather than managers wastefully firefighting to avert one financial crisis after another.