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Hospital Trusts (Essex)

The hon. Gentleman has a short memory about the state that the national health service was in during in the 1990s, when people routinely waited hours on end in accident and emergency departments up and down the country. I was looking last week at the patients charter, which, in the mid-'90s, set an 18-month maximum wait for treatment and a year's maximum wait for heart bypass operations. Will he tell us how many people waiting for those heart bypasses never got to have the final operation, such was the state of the national health service in those days? Improvement has taken place in the NHS, but I say again that I do not over-claim for the NHS. When it needs to be better, I will say so and we will take the necessary action to make it happen.