COUNCILLOR Thomas (Letters, February 4) may be sick and tired of the Tories running down the NHS, but I would remind her that many of them fell for Tony Blair's spin in 1997 and his pledge to give the NHS top priority and that is why her party is now in power.

The reality has not lived up to the promise. Perhaps she can explain why, eight years later, despite extra funding, the hospital has a debt approaching £3m and a loan of £3.7m which has to be repaid by April 2006.

I am also tired of comments from people who have little or no long term personal experience as a patient or visitor, many of whom are in the hospital for a relatively short time for a routine operation and are too ill or worried to have time to see what is going on around them.

Patients, often elderly, with long term potentially life threatening conditions requiring regular hospital treatment are not so fortunate.

After GP referrals, I often had to wait all day with a distressed patient for a telephone call from the hospital when a bed was available, which was not usually until evening. Outside GP hours, we had to go through A & E and, yes, the distressed patient was seen late at night just within the four-hour target but still had to wait on a trolley until the middle of the night for a bed.

Sheila Jones' mother (Letters, February 8 ) was fortunate to be able to pay for her hip replacement privately. This option was not available to us. The diagnostic procedure was not available due to lack of funds and we became the victim of delays caused by targets until, after pressure, the test was carried out at another hospital six months later .

Cllr Thomas is wrong to say that the extra money has been put to good use. A lot of it has been was wasted on non-essential things like the smoking shelters and the recent refurbishment of the gents toilet at the main entrance, all at the expense of providing beds when needed. It is debatable whether the new eye unit is essential.

The A & E Department may be the busiest in Greater Manchester, Cllr Thomas, but 20 per cent of the patients passing through it are from Wigan, Salford and Trafford so that 20 per cent of those admitted are taking beds from the people of Bolton. It is therefore not surprising that those authorities met their A & E targets and retained or increased their star ratings, thus giving them access to further funding.

(name & address supplied)