A fingers-crossed approach to health care that "approaches criminal negligence".

That is the charge levelled at health bosses today. Not by us, but by a York Hospital consultant.

The comments, contained in an email leaked to The Press, amount to the most scathing critique yet of the risks being taken with our health in an attempt to claw back millions in debt.

The unnamed consultant makes clear it is not hospital managers he blames, but the primary care trust bureaucrats who hold the purse strings.

He slams them for l cutting funding so that York Hospital beds have had to be reduced l having no contingency plans to deal with urgent but not life-threatening admissions when beds are full l having no centralised system for finding where the nearest available bed is l "woolly" thinking, poor planning and a "hoping for the best" approach to dealing with urgent admissions that "approaches criminal negligence".

We have warned before of the way in which patients' health is being endangered by the short-sighted attempts of PCT managers to save money.

Nothing we have said, however, comes close to this: a damning indictment of an ailing health system by a senior medic working at its heart.