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The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has been forced to undergo an extremely painful and career threatening major U-turn operation, after newly released figures show that surgery waiting times in the NHS are starting to creep up since the coalition took power.

The medical procedure on the extreme right of one of his badly-functioning internal organs responsible for decision-making, known by medical experts as the ‘brain’, is being undertaken after Mr Lansley started displaying symptoms such as extreme short-sightedness, insensitivity and intellectual ineptitude.

Mr Lansley’s failure to tackle the growing number of patients not undergoing surgery within the guaranteed 18 weeks, is seen by medical experts as further evidence of the extreme damage that has obviously occurred to the Health Secretary’s peripheral motor skills, resulting in serious failures of minor functions such as ‘thinking’ and ‘acting’. The operation, which involves making a complete u-turn on Mr Lansley’s more hardened thought processes, is now seen by medical experts as essential to the Health Secretary’s survival, although it is still too early to tell if the u-turn procedure will be successful. As one medical expert explained:

After undergoing such a dangerous u-turn operation, it’s always 50/50 whether the patient will be able to continue to function effectively or even if he will survive the procedure at all. In Mr Lansley’s case, it looks as if he was displaying such extreme symptoms of failure in his decision making processes that the doctors had no other choice than to operate.

Nevertheless, Mr Lansley’s move to accept and undertake the u-turn operation comes as some surprise because the health secretary had previously stated that such an operation would be unnecessary, and indeed undesirable, as it would mean accepting treatment which he had previously described as “bureaucratic” and “top-down”, and a part of a medical system introduced by the previous Labour administration which he felt should be overhauled.

A spokesperson for Labour said the party had been concerned about the deterioration of Mr Lansley’s health reforms for some time and had been urging him to follow the advice of health experts by accepting that he should belatedly embrace the sort of treatment Labour had been using to cut medical problems which are known to afflict Health Secretaries, such as long hospital waiting lists.

But Mr Lansley’s decision only came after he had insisted for many months that the condition of his NHS waiting times remained “low and stable”, despite expert medical evidence that the opposite was true.

Labour were quick to seize on Lansley’s new approach, saying the health secretary had refused to heed warnings that relaxing waiting-time targets would inevitably mean unnecessary pain, discomfort and frustration.

In reply, Mr Lansley said:

Yes, but I’ll be able to handle the pain, discomfort and frustration because it’ll be NHS users who’ll be feeling it and not rich people with expensive private health plans like me, won’t it?

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