The National Health Service should be just that – a national health service – providing equal access to treatment, regardless of where the patient lives.

However, in the past few years I have seen a significant increase in the number of constituents complaining to me that funding for a treatment prescribed by their doctor has been denied by the North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust. I have found out in many cases that if they lived in other parts of Yorkshire the NHS would pay for the same treatment.

I was recently contacted by a young woman who was brutally attacked by her former partner and suffered multiple fractures in her nose. She needs surgery to correct a breathing problem, but funding was refused by our local primary care trust. I have raised the case with the new GP-led Vale of York Care Commissioning Group, which this month replaced the primary care trust.

I fear these problems will get worse because the increase in funding for the NHS is not keeping pace with the ever-growing number of elderly patients.

According to figures published in January in answer to a Parliamentary Question, patients served by the new Vale of York Care Commissioning Group will receive less funding than people in other parts of North Yorkshire. Patients in Ryedale and Scarborough, for example, will receive 17.5 per cent more funding – £1,234 per person on average, compared to £1,050 per person in York – even though the hospital and community health services in both places are provided by the same NHS Foundation Trust.

Until the Government’s latest health reforms all patients in North Yorkshire and York were treated equally; but the introduction of the new commissioning groups means there will be more fragmentation and, as the figures show, patients from York and the Vale of York will do particularly badly.

A year and a half ago, as a result of the increase in the number of constituents complaining about treatment being denied by their primary care trust, I introduced a Bill in the House of Commons to seek to end postcode rationing of treatment for NHS patients.

My Bill sought to ensure that any medical treatment prescribed by a doctor would be provided by the NHS unless the Secretary of State for Health, or his medical and scientific advisers at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, said no; to establish a national register of all cases where treatment is refused, to act as a check on creeping privatisation of NHS services; and to give patients a right of appeal if treatment is denied.

Cases like the woman with the broken nose show just how distressing it is for patients who are refused treatment.

I have raised the issue of the shortfall in funding in the Vale of York with the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and I am hoping to reintroduce my Health Bill when the opportunity arises.