JOIN us in our campaign to create a new £1million purpose-built coronary care unit at the Royal Bolton Hospital.

Today marks the start of the Bolton Evening News' 2002 fundraising appeal to build a lifesaving facility the town can be proud of.

You have done it before -- working together we can do it again.

The town's public was responsible for raising the cash to build the current unit, which has served Bolton's heart patients since the 1960s.

Thousands of the town's heart patients have passed through its doors since. But times have moved on, and the unit is now cramped and dark by today's standards.

We now need to build a unit for the Twenty-first Century. One which can cope with increased demand, and that can respond with the latest up-to-date technology to save the lives of heart sufferers living within the town.

Hundreds of patients come to the coronary unit each year. Its emergency doors lead into a care unit which is now out-dated, too small and unable to cope with the ever increasing numbers of heart patients.

Figures recently published in the Bolton Evening News showed Bolton suffers more than almost anywhere else in the country with victims of heart disease.

Yes, in an ideal world the Government would fund a new building. But we all know the reality is very different, and that is why we should take matters into our own hands.

What could be more appropriate than to raise money for a life-saving unit which is likely to touch almost every family living within the town and its surrounding areas?

The appeal is being sent out to young and old, individuals and businesses, to help by making any kind of contribution, no matter how small.

Individual donations are just as welcome as large corporate ones.

This is a campaign which should exclude nobody and we urge the public to join in our appeal.

The aim is to capture the imagination of the people who matter -- the town's public -- and to encourage a wealth of fundraising organisations and events.

We deserve the best -- and it is now up to us as a town to make sure we can get it.