Vince Cable

The local health service (Primary Care Trust) is achieving some of its objectives but its falling down badly in some others:

• The number of people quitting smoking is barely half the objective

• There are shortfalls in some ambulance time responses including the 8-minute response for emergencies (just under 75% are within time)

• Breast cancer screening for 50 to 70 year old women is well below target (60% versus 80%)

• Teenage pregnancy rates have hardly fallen despite an ambitious target of 15% reduction from 1998 levels

• Diabetes sugar level management is also well below target

The NHS does exceptionally well, however, in other areas: reduced outpatient waits; infant mortality reduction; most cancer referrals; infection control.

Vincent Cable MP said: "I have great reservations about the way the NHS spends lots of time devising targets which often distort clinical priorities and then spends bureaucratic resources monitoring them. But the one benefit is that we have some benchmarks to judge whether or not the NHS is achieving its stated objectives."