THE endorsement of specialist hospitals by the Prime Minister should guarantee the NHS finding the cash to rebuild Stanmore's Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital.
Successive governments have supported the option of creating new wards but none has scraped together the cash to make it happen, so an intervention like this from Gordon Brown carries enormous weight.
The hospital trust has pulled some political strings and appealed directly to the Department of Health and 10 Downing Street over the heads of bosses at NHS London, which it felt was taking too long to commit to allocating the cash.
However, given past inaction, members of the trust are unlikely to relax until they actually see the money in the bank.
Acting on past events
THE feelings experienced by the two students who visited Auschwitz shows just how important it is for younger generations to learn about the horror of the second world war genocide.
They talk of how the trip profoundly affected them and helped to humanise a place and the terrible practices they had previously only read about.
Seeing at first hand the scale and savagery of the way the Nazis brought about the death of millions of Jews, the students were reminded how important it is to be proactive to prevent such a thing happening again rather than sitting back and merely acknowledging that it was a dark period in Western Europe's modern history.
