NHS patients can make an informed choice about where they would like to be treated

Alan Milburn

It will also accept bids from private and foreign hospitals to treat patients.

Ministers have promised that from July anyone who has been waiting more than six months for a heart operation in England will be given a choice.

They can continue to wait to be treated locally, or travel elsewhere in the NHS for the operation.

In some cases they might be offered treatment in a private hospital or abroad, paid for by the taxpayer.

Specially trained nurses will help them make that choice.

They will use data collected by the new National Cardiac Co-ordination Unit which will try to sort out where the spare capacity is.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn said on Wednesday that �100m would be made available to fund at least an extra 4,000 operations.

Hospitals with spare capacity will be invited to bid for the new money.

However, the Tories said the money would do little to increase patient choice.

'Patient choice'

It is a shame that Alan Milburn is giving heart patients hopes which can only be dashed

Dr Liam Fox

Mr Milburn acknowledged that waiting times for heart disease - one of the country's biggest killers - were still too long.

He said: "The extra �100m will provide hospitals with a positive incentive to treat more patients more quickly."

The government wants to reduce the waiting times for heart surgery to a maximum of nine months by April 2003.

The new proposals have been drawn up with collaboration from patients, medical staff and managers, the health secretary said on Wednesday.

And he said the results of the initiative would be monitored to see such patient choice could be extended elsewhere.

Major killer

Shadow health secretary Dr Liam Fox said: "The money isn't new, and neither is the misleading impression it gives that patients will have a real choice of hospital.

"Labour still sees patients as their property, to be shunted around depending on political rather than clinical priorities. The day of genuine choice in our healthcare system is a long way off.

"It is a shame that Alan Milburn is giving heart patients hopes which can only be dashed."

A British Heart Foundation spokesman said heart disease remained the UK's biggest killer and policies that focused on prevention were badly needed.

His announcement comes as the health secretary is reported to be drawing up a "national framework for hospital pricing" to stop the private sector overcharging the NHS for operations it carries out.

'Fast track'

In December Mr Milburn promised that from July this year, patients waiting for more than six months for heart surgery will be offered the choice of treatment elsewhere.

Already patients are being sent elsewhere in Europe and to private hospitals in this country to speed up treatment.

Groups of patients from the south coast have been treated at teaching hospitals in France and Germany in a three-month pilot scheme.

They have been having operations for hip and knee replacements and cataracts on the continent, where a surplus of doctors can mean faster treatment.

And at a military hospital in Portsmouth, Doctors and nurses from Germany are being hired by the government to carry out "fast track" operations.

Mr Milburn has said that wherever they are treated - even if it is in a Bupa hospital - a patient will always remain an NHS patient.