A man suffering from a potentially fatal condition has had vital surgery cancelled seven times because of a shortage of intensive care beds.

Jack Barnett, from Scarborough, had surgery on a blood vessel cancelled an hour before it was due to begin.

On another occasion he was given an anaesthetic before the operation on an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a weakening of an artery, was abandoned.

Last August Mr Barnett, who is in his late fifties, was advised he needed treatment within six weeks.

The case has come to light just days after doctors rejected government claims that it has created 100 new intensive care beds this winter.

In an open letter to health secretary Alan Milburn, the Intensive Care Society said that although extra cash was supplied to the NHS, there was no tangible evidence it was used for an extra 100 beds.

Gilly Collinson, of Scarborough NHS Trust, said: "We can only bring someone in for major surgery such as this if we know that there is an intensive care bed available in which they can receive post-operative care.

"That has been the problem - we have not had the intensive care beds available. It would therefore be to put somebody at risk to operate on them under those circumstances."

Emergency admission

Ms Collinson said an operation would only have been cancelled after anaesthetic had been administered if an emergency had arrived at the hospital requiring immediate care.

She said: "The vast majority of cases coming into the NHS are actually emergency admissions, and we have no control over those at all.

"If, for example, somebody is in a road accident and requires an intensive care bed we have to allocate that bed to them and we simply cannot then perform elective surgery on anyone.

"Scarborough is a relatively small trust, we only have four intensive care beds. As you can imagine there is very little flexibility in the system."

Mr Barnett's wife said tonight that she did not want to discuss details of the cancelled operations.

She said that her husband might be prepared to talk about the issue at a later time