Opinion

Successive governments have massaged the figures so they show them in a good light.

But now it seems the hospitals themselves are under pressure to doctor figures to come out well in league tables that are now all the vogue.

Reports have shown that the Royal United Hospital, in Bath, claimed that only 122 patients had waited more than 13 months for an operation while the correct number was more than 2,000.

Just what the hospital hoped to gain by this type of misinformation is not entirely clear.

But it has also been revealed that the hospital is more than £17 million overspent when it had predicted the figure would be closer to £4 million.

Hospitals do not need to compete for patients. Most of us are just glad to get an appointment sometime in the not too distant future when we are referred by our GPs.

We are grateful to get a bed, even if an operation is cancelled a few times before we actually get to lie in it and delighted to queue up for a scan or other test in an overcrowded waiting room for hour upon hour.

Most of us believe the doctors, nurses and other staff are doing everything they can to make us better and are working long hours in difficult conditions.

But there is no excuse for hospital managers, who are usually extremely well paid to do a stressful job, trying to make figures show one thing when the truth is clearly something different.

We all know friends and family who have waited and waited for a routine operation. MP James Gray says he has a sackful of letters from people complaining about the health service in general and the RUH in particular.

More money would help but there is no point giving a hospital more money unless the people holding the purse strings use it wisely.

Judging by what has been revealed at the Bath hospital in the past few days the management needs to be sorted out before too many more resources are put in.

So far the noises made by those in charge of the hospital have not been very reassuring.