MICHAEL HOWARD provoked a row yesterday by raising the case of a woman still waiting for surgery after seven cancellations.

He highlighted the plight of Margaret Dixon, 69, whose operation to repair a broken shoulder was repeatedly postponed because of a shortage of high-dependency beds.

Mr Howard said that her experience represented the “real world” in the National Health Service where extra money being spent was not reaching front-line services.

Tony Blair said that such an experience was unacceptable but was exceptional.

The row was the first time that Mr Howard had raised the case of an individual patient at Prime Minister’s Questions since he misrepresented the facts concerning a breast cancer patient from his constituency last June. He claimed that she would have to wait 20 months for radiation treatment, rather than 20 weeks.

Mr Howard said that Mrs Dixon, who lives in Penketh, near Warrington, Cheshire, and has osteoarthritis, was told that she might not survive surgery and on each occasion said goodbye to her family in case she did not.

Hers was not an isolated case, the Tory leader said, and 67,000 people had NHS operations cancelled last year, 10,000 more than five years ago.

The Prime Minister snapped back that the Conservatives had faxed him information on Mrs Dixon’s case seven or eight minutes before he entered the chamber and he could not know all the facts of her case, but most NHS patients were well treated.

Extra money being spent on the NHS, which the Conservatives opposed, could be seen in more nurses, extra wards, new hospitals and the fact that cancer deaths were down by 30,000 under this Government and cardiac deaths are down 25,000 a year, Mr Blair said.

The row heightened as Mr Howard said that extra money was being spent on bureaucrats in primary care trusts and managers in the NHS, whose numbers were rising at three times the rate of doctors and nurses while average waiting times had risen in the past four years.

“Mrs Dixon and the 67,000 patients who have had their operations cancelled represent the real world and the real NHS and you are living in an entirely different universe,” the Conservative leader said.

Mr Howard said the reality of the NHS under Labour was that 250,000 people without medical insurance paid for private care because they would not get the treatment they wanted under the NHS, a threefold rise.

Labour MPs roared as Mr Blair attacked the Tories’ so-called right-to-choose policy under which patients could opt for treatment at a private hospital if the cost was the same as under the NHS or be subsidised for half the fee if it cost more.

“What is his proposal?” Mr Blair asked. “It is to take £1 billion out of the health service and spend it on his voucher scheme that would give people who go privately half of the cost of their operation.

“He says they would get treated, but only if they could afford the other half. Don’t the Tories ever learn? Stand up and tell us how an old age pensioner, living on the pension, is going to afford a hip operation.”

North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust did not contest the facts of Mrs Dixon’s complaint, but referred in a statement to special clinical needs that required care after surgery in the high-dependency unit at Warrington Hospital, which had faced unforeseen demand on each occasion.

It said her operation would be rescheduled soon.

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