Featuring two new in-depth national surveys on minimum waiting times and ward closures, this programme reveals how operations are being delayed and even cancelled to hit financial targets, costly IT systems are undermining patient safety and GPs have seen their salaries increase even though they no longer have to work 'out-of-hours'.

The government has pumped billions into cancer care. But, as Dispatches reveals, patient recovery is being hampered by bureaucracy and delays in treatment. Two of the UK's leading NHS cancer specialists tell the programme that while ministers have focused on targets for initial consultation and treatments, delays in post-operative follow-up radiotherapy pose threats to patient safety.

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The government's ambitious NHS IT revolution in the NHS is set to cost £12bn - more than four times the original estimate. The world's largest civilian IT project, it is being overseen by the government body 'Connecting for Health'. But as Dispatches reveals, one part of the project - an appointment-making service called Choose and Book - is so unpopular and unwieldy that many GPs refuse to use it. Two of the UK's top NHS clinicians also speak out in the programme for the first time about how new child immunization software could lead to children's health being put at risk.

One local GP working in a Primary Care Trust (PCT) with one of the worst deficits in the country tells Dispatches that steps taken by ministers so far seem to be compromising patient care rather than helping it. He shows Halligan a letter from his PCT listing hospital procedures which can no longer can be undertaken - a letter he finds 'deeply offensive from both a clinical and a moral point of view'.

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