THE crisis in the NHS in Bucks has made staff very, very angry says Conservative MP David Lidington.

He was speaking in an adjournment debate in the Westminster Hall of the House of Commons on Wednesday, led by his Wycombe colleague Paul Goodman.

Mr Lidington said: "I am prepared to believe that health ministers have the best of intentions towards health services.

"But in the last year I have had senior executives phoning me on their private mobiles and saying they can't tell the truth about the local NHS."

He said people came to his surgery with stories - but asked him not to reveal their names and nurses told him they were afraid to speak out about changes in primary care services.

"The Government should hang its head in shame," said Mr Lidington The debate, in a secondary chamber of the house, was a polite affair, without the bells and whistles, boos, hisses and cheers of a debate in the main chamber.

It was attended only by the Bucks MPs, Government health minister Ivan Lewis, health spokesmen for the Conservatives, Dr Andrew Murrison, and the Lib Dems, Steve Webb, plus officials.

But it gave Mr Goodman and his Tory colleagues an opportunity to cover in detail all the troubles of the NHS in the county over the past few years - the constant changes and their effects, government targets and their effects the finances, the cuts, the health risks, and the individual problems brought to them by patients.

Opening the debate Mr Goodman said Wycombe Hospital was becoming little more than a centre for routine operations. Its future was still not certain.

He told the minister that local health professionals, all political parties and the 40,000 people who signed a petition, had opposed the changes at the hospital outlined in the 2004 document Shaping Health Services Mr Goodman said a letter, a year ago, from consultant anaesthetists at Wycombe said the changes, under SHS, to the A&E department, had put patents' lives at risk. He had now received one from Bucks Hospitals' Trust acting Chief Executive, Alan Bedford, saying the trust would put in medical cover 24/7 at Wycombe A&E and make sure the departments at both Wycombe and Stoke Mandeville hospitals were up to standard Mr Bedford's letter also stated that there were risks involved in the complex SHS changes.

"This is the first time the trust has been so candid" said Mr Goodman. "This confirms that my first concerns were reasonable."

"We still don't know fully the future of our local hospitals or of our community hospitals."

Some of Mr Goodman's constituents from Marlow travel out of the county to Wexham Park for treatment. The MP questioned whether this was being planned for by the two trusts involved.

Getting to hospital along the A4010 from Wycombe to Aylesbury, whether by car, bus or ambulance, is one of Mr Goodman's big concerns.

He complained about the time needed to travel the A4010, asked if hospital bus services were running properly and said 999 ambulance calls had risen by 21 per cent in the Wycombe area in the past year and that the service might not be able to cope in the case of a flu outbreak or a terrorist attack.

Turning to money the MP said the new countywide Primary Care Trust faced a £15.2 million deficit and was looking for £3.5 million cuts.

He said the constant changes in the NHS - hospital mergers, new groups and trusts, new managers - weakened accountability and made sensible medium term planning difficult.

"As our constituents look round they see hospital cuts, cuts in primary care and the likelihood of more cuts."

It was a descending spiral of cuts and closures, safety and quality of care, in which senior managers dipped in and out, and the stability of the past did not exist. All the MPs are worried about the way NHS money is handed out which leaves Bucks getting far below average per head.

Mr Lidington quoted figures from former Thames Valley NHS chief executive Nick Relph showing that next year Thames Valley would get £575 million more, if funded at the average rate per head and £1.2 billion more if funded at the highest rate.

Beaconsfield MP Dominic Grieve agreed that the Government had sunk a lot of money into the NHS over the last nine years, but said his problem was finding out where it was going in Bucks and why the county faced constant cutting back on services.

"I would have expected some little crumbs would be falling from the table towards us," he said.

His said the national NHS funding formula directed money into disadvantaged areas. He didn't question the need, but said disadvantaged people in his constituency were suffering and would be better off moving to Liverpool where health spending is far higher per head.

A Department of Health spokesman, who would not be named, said: "Funding allocations are fairer than ever before, as the greatest allocations go to those PCTs with the greatest need.

"Let's not forget that all PCTs have received an increase of around a third to their three-year allocations. They are made on the basis of need and there is a formula used to determine each PCT's fair share of funding. Factors used to determine the allocation are: count of population, adjustment to reflect differences in age, adjustment to reflect healthcare need (e.g. deprivation), adjustment to reflect unavoidable differences in cost (e.g. regional differences in pay) and an adjustment to reflect rurality."