MARGARET DIXON has said her goodbyes to her family seven times, after being told that she has a less than one in three chance of surviving an operation to repair her fractured shoulder.

Each time, her operation has been cancelled because of a shortage of “high-dependency beds” at Warrington General Hospital to monitor her after surgery.

She waited four months to be admitted to the hospital after a fall in August last year. After Mrs Dixon, 69, had her operation cancelled for the fifth time, shortly before Christmas, her family contacted their local councillor, Fiona Bruce, who is also the prospective parliamentary candidate in Warrington South for the Conservatives.

Mrs Dixon, a grandmother and former secretary, said that she blamed Tony Blair for her ordeal. She said: “I have been waiting for this operation. Now I am in a situation where my right arm is useless and my hand has gone into a claw.”

Mrs Dixon said that she was happy for Michael Howard, the Tory leader, to raise her case. “I was happy to have it used to highlight the fact that where the NHS may have improved in the past eight years, the area where I really require it, it hasn’t. And it has not done any good for me.”

She said that doctors and nurses, rather than the Government, should decide how NHS cash was spent.

Mrs Dixon said that she was not a member of any political party, and added that the Conservatives did not necessarily have any better solutions to NHS problems.

“I am concerned with the present,” she said. “It is this Labour Government at the present who are affecting my chances of an operation.”

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