THE Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for the borough has welcomed party leader David Cameron’s restating of his commitment to the NHS.

Stuart Penketh says proposed Tory policies not only give patients a better choice and service, but also free up the doctors and medical professionals from restrictive, Government-set targets.

These targets, he argues, have little to do with the well-being of patients and everything to do with this Government’s “obsession with state control”.

Mr Penketh said: “Despite the 64 targets the Labour Party has set for the NHS over a 10-year period, in the last year there were 6,000 cases of MRSA in England alone – since Labour came to power the number of deaths from this infection have quadrupled.

“A target to halve MRSA infections, set in 2004, has now been shelved by the Department of Health as they believe it will be almost impossible to achieve.

“Gordon Brown himself knows that the fightback on MRSA should start in the simplest of places – hospital cleanliness.

“In an interview with the News of the World he announced a policy to give every hospital an annual deep clean.

“However, the Department of Health has admitted that there is no evidence for this programme and it would not be monitored.”

Added Mr Penketh: “Once again, Labour have shown that their policies are nothing more than spin over substance, stemming from a desperate need to control every aspect of our public lives and cumulating in ineffective targets which, more often than not, escalate the very situation they were trying to control.

“David Cameron has just proposed a new style of NHS care – moving away from being driven by targets to being driven by patient care.

“A Conservative government would scrap government-imposed, statistic-driven targets, and instead focus on outcome and patient experience.”