PEOPLE power has plainly pushed health chiefs into action over the scandalous 40-week wait East Lancashire patients face to get a wheelchair.

For now they are ploughing an extra £126,000 into the problem-plagued service in a bid to cut the wait to 15 weeks next year and to just a fortnight by the year 2000.

We welcome this step.

But, even so, even halving the current waiting time still means that sick people and their carers will be deprived of a vital quality-of-life aid for a long time - too long.

It is not as if the amount of money needed to cut the delay to acceptable levels is huge.

But if the NHS is so strapped for resources to fully fund this goal, how about the health authority dipping into the brimming cash pot revealed yesterday?

They are, we are told, to have talks with fundholding GP practices in East Lancashire which have more than £1million in surpluses.

The money ought to have gone on patient care but the doctors have not used it.

Now the talks are being held with the aim of ensuring it is spent in the "common interest."

Reducing patients' wait for a wheelchair to zero this year, rather than by the Millennium, we suggest is perfectly in the common interest of the sick, their doctors and the health authority.

Cough up, docs.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.