The health secretary will take personal responsibility for ensuring that the NHS is in financial balance by the end of March next year, she told the Commons health select committee last week.

The health secretary will take personal responsibility for ensuring that the NHS is in financial balance by the end of March next year, she told the Commons health select committee last week.

Patricia Hewitt was responding to a question from Liberal Democrat MP Sandra Gidley, as part of the health committee's inquiry into NHS deficits, on whether her own job would be 'on the line' if the NHS did not solve its financial problems in this financial year.

'We will return the NHS to financial balance by the end of March next year and I take personal responsibility for that,' she told MPs.

But she stressed that some NHS organisations would need longer to return to financial balance. 'Some organisations need to be given more time because problems have built up in the NHS over the years.'

Several MPs were concerned about the effects of financial cuts on education and training for health professionals. She accepted that some cuts were inevitable but that, for example, doctors' training would not be cut half way through their courses.

Independent MP Dr Richard Taylor said that training for healthcare assistants had been cut and Ms Hewitt agreed that this was one area affected.

She added that she had asked the chief nursing officer to examine the problem of newly qualified staff not being able to find jobs in the NHS on a regional basis.

Labour MP Dr Howard Stoate cited figures showing that while 11 per cent of trusts without a private finance initiative project had deficits, around 23 per cent of trusts with a PFI project had a deficit, and that they were an 'immovable burden' for them.

Ms Hewitt said: 'This is really nothing to do with PFIs, it's about reacting to changes in medicine and providing better services, such as community diagnostics, and how the hospital chooses to fund that is their decision.'

Ms Gidley also said new figures on programme budgeting threw up some puzzling variations.

'The figures show, for example, that Oxford primary care trust spent around 23 per cent of its budget on cancer services, whereas Newcastle-under-Lyme PCT spent only 2 per cent, which seems astonishing,' said Ms Gidley. She asked if the panel could explain these variations.

NHS director of finance Richard Douglas said that the raw figures did not allow any understanding of how PCTs spent their money and that the DoH would be trying to improve the quality of information on programme budgeting.

And Labour MP Jim Dowd said that the health secretary's assertion to the committee earlier this year that all trusts would have achieved foundation trust status by 2008 looked very ambitious, a view with which Mr Nicholson agreed.

'It is unlikely that all trusts will have achieved foundation trust status by 2008. We expect to have around 70-80 per cent of trusts with foundation status by 2008,' he said.

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