It’s official– financial experts are finally admitting what we already knew, things are getting worse not better …newsflash…

And if it wasn’t already abundantly clear to me how close to the edge our strangled economy is teetering, witnessing the slow fiscal asphyxiation of the NHS has me utterly convinced writes Emma Suddaby.

And the result is that tightly stretched resources are dividing patients into the very sub-classes experts predicted would be the result of any private sector involvement – oh the irony…

Take the Orthopaedic Hospital in Gobowen for example, a centre of excellence for orthopaedics and without whom I would have succumbed to a wheelchair long ago.

To the average patient needing a (nice profitable) hip or knee replacement, it looks and feels like a prosperous hospital. Day-surgery units are shiny, new and well-equipped, waiting lists short. And every part of the hospital these patients will pass through, like out-patient clinics, is renovated and renewed.

But should you find yourself on the tail-end of a degenerative disease, needing constant medical support and intervention, you’ll find the wards not quite so shiny, the equipment far from new and the expensive but life-enhancing drugs, very often out-of reach.

I had to visit the chronic pain clinic this week – the last resort of the unfixable. Patients visiting this department are by their very nature an expensive, incurable, ongoing burden on the hospital budget and the treatments offered them attempt to do nothing more than improve quality of life.

Far from the shiny, newly renovated world of day-surgery, the pain clinic is a dusty, drab outpost in the oldest part of the hospital. No receptionist, no nurses attending the solitary consultant who operates from an old office, filled with files and the barest minimum of basic, out-dated equipment.

It’s clear that services such as these lie far behind more profitable treatments in the affections of hospital managers – and so the NHS sub-class is born.

An often second rate medical service reserved for those too weak to care about hand-me-down equipment, too sick and tired to complain as the budgets for parts of the hospital that make such a difference to what is left of their lives, are sliced ever nearer to the proverbial bone.