THE health service is scarcely out of the news these days - and usually for all the wrong reasons.

Yesterday, we reported that beds at York Hospital were set to be closed. That news followed the revelation 200 hospital posts were to be cut, and a mental health rehabilitation unit in York could shut.

Yesterday we asked: where is it all going to end? Today we make no apology for asking that question again. Because if anything, the news today is even worse.

Hospital bosses in York have revealed they will need to save more than £16 million over the next five years. That works out at more than £3 million a year.

Precisely what the impact of these cuts will be has not yet been revealed. But it is not hard to imagine. More beds closing; more posts lost; staff morale plunging ever lower.

The financial crisis facing York Hospital is the direct consequence of the debt racked up by the Selby and York Primary Care Trust - the body which commissions health care in this region.

As it struggles to recover from its own £23 million debt, it is saying it will refer fewer patients to hospital.

To some extent, that is part of a long-term plan for the future of the health service. The trend has been towards reducing the need for hospital stays by treating patients as outpatients, or providing

operations on a day-case basis.

But the bleak picture in York is repeated nationwide. More than 7,000 health service jobs are being lost, and a poll for the Royal College of Nursing revealed almost half of senior nurses have seen cuts in staff in the last year.

That doesn't sound to us like the health service's best year ever, despite what embattled Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt says.

Updated: 09:06 Tuesday, April 25, 2006