LONDON (AP) – Margaret Dixon’s shoulder has sparked a political storm in Britain.

With a national election expected in early May, the pensioner’s six-month wait for an operation has Prime Minister Tony Blair on the defensive and his political foes decrying the state of the National Health Service.

After eight years in power, Blair’s government insists that the taxpayer-funded health care system has improved. The main opposition Conservative Party disagrees and has eagerly seized on the 69-year-old Dixon’s plight.

“She and her family, like everyone else, have paid their taxes and were promised by Mr. Blair’s government a better, more responsive NHS,” Conservative leader Michael Howard said Friday. “This is what Mr. Blair’s NHS has done for Mrs. Dixon. She is in constant pain and desperately needs an operation.”

Blair angrily accused Howard of using the retiree as a political pawn to “to run down and denigrate the whole of our NHS.”

In a speech to Labour delegates in Scotland on Friday, Blair said there were 100,000 more nurses and doctors than in 1997, 100 new hospital building programs, 500,000 more operations a year and drastically reduced waiting times thanks to billions of dollars of extra investment.

The Conservatives say that millions in public money is wasted on NHS bureaucracy.

, that 67,000 operations were canceled last year, 10,000 more than in 1999, and that cases of drug-resistant “superbug” infection have risen threefold since 1997 due to dirty hospitals.

The battle of Margaret’s shoulder, as it has been dubbed by the British press, thrusts health care to the forefront of what will be a bitterly fought election campaign. Opinion polls show health as one of the three big issues of concern to voters, along with crime and immigration.

Howard raised the case in Parliament on Wednesday. Dixon, he explained, had broken her shoulder in August, and Warrington General Hospital in northern England had canceled her operation seven times.

Conservative PR staff camped out in Dixon’s living room Thursday to field telephone calls from the media, while Howard held a news conference with her family. Her husband Ken delivered a letter to Blair’s Downing Street office urging the prime minister to resolve the matter.

Hospital authorities insisted her operation had been canceled only three times. Her weak heart meant she would need a critical care bed and priority had to be given to emergency cases, they said. The story was plastered across the front pages of Britain’s newspapers Friday and dominated television news coverage.

Dr. Sam Everington, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association, said many doctors believed hospitals were becoming dirtier due to private contractors taking over cleaning services. The BMA also feared that a government policy of allowing privately run centers to carry out minor operations was destabilizing the NHS. But the overall picture, he said, was positive.

“The NHS has definitely improved. There is more money going in than under the previous government, waiting times are down and general practices are seeing great advances in technology and quality of service,” he said.

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