LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair put his head on the block of better public services on Sunday, saying he was prepared to take the consequences if the nation's struggling health service was not fixed by the time of the next election.

Blair insisted the National Health Service (NHS) was on the mend and promised the system would be ``dramatically improved'' before Britons voted in national elections, due by May 2006.

``I am so confident of that, let me say this: If the NHS is not basically fixed by the next election, then I am quite happy to suffer the consequences,'' he told the Sunday People tabloid newspaper in an interview. ``I am quite willing to be held to account by the voters if we fail.''

The government's defiance followed a week of bitter political battling over the health service. Opposition Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith used recent reports of poor hospital care for a 94-year-old woman as an example of its failures.

He clashed with Blair in parliament over the case of Rose Addis, whose relatives claimed she had received inadequate care in the hospital.

Blair hit back, accusing Duncan Smith of opportunism and of not checking the facts with the hospital, which hotly denied the allegations.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn described the week's battling as ``probably the most important debate in British politics.''

Liam Fox, the Conservative's health spokesman, defended his party's decision to use an individual case to highlight health service woes. ``That's our job--to raise the issues that the public are unhappy about,'' he told the BBC.

During his first term in government, Blair launched a bitter attack on public service inertia, saying he bore ``scars on his back'' from trying to push vested interest groups to modernise.

But now the language has changed. On Sunday Blair accused the Tories of deliberately undermining Britain's public services and cast himself, in contrast, as a ``committed believer'' in state education and healthcare.

He praised doctors and nurses working in the NHS, and said Duncan Smith should remember attacking the service amounted to attacking those who work in it.

Fox said Labour's accusations were ridiculous.

``This is a preposterous argument--that if you raise legitimate concerns on behalf of patients you are setting out to undermine the NHS or to damage the morale of doctors and nurses inside the service,'' he said.

He said the difference between the two parties was that Conservatives viewed patients as the central issue, while Labour was determined to defend the NHS system at all costs.

Reference Source 89

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".