PRESSURE is growing to protect vital services to hundreds of unpaid carers.

Party politics were put aside as Skipton's Conservative MP David Curry offered to intervene personally with local health leaders and Phil Willis (Lib Dem, Harrogate) and Anne McIntosh (Conservative, Vale of York) each wrote to Health Secretary Alan Milburn pleading the case for official funding of the carer support team at The Carers' Resource.

Time is running out before the nationally acclaimed carers' organisation based in Skipton and Harrogate is compelled to close its doors to new referrals from GPs by May 1 and to phase out its existing caseload over the coming months.

Both Craven and Harrogate Councils are backing The Carers' Resource by asking the Craven, Harrogate and Rural District Primary Care Trust to reverse its decision to refuse £120,000 of its £170,000,000 budget to fund the team of seven carer support officers.

Dr Eric Ward of Settle's Townhead Surgery has urged the PCT to think again and come up with a reasonable funding package for the next three years.

He said: "Recently our practice received a questionnaire from Carers' Resource to gauge our usage of this service. I speak for all my partner colleagues and other members of our primary healthcare team and wish to make it very clear that we value greatly the role that The Carers' Resource has developed in our practice.

"The simple, non-bureaucratic referral pathway into the service provided by Carers Resource has helped the carers of our patients within every aspect of the health and social care spectrum. The important co-ordinating role that Sue Clements has developed ties in all the numerous strands of health, social care and benefits.

"Good support to carers will no doubt reduce the need for hospital admission, respite care admissions etc. In the long term overall costs to health and social services should be less. This is the long-term approach, which should be adopted by health care planners and finance departments.

"We would urge the PCT to help with the funding of The Carers' Resource in a longer term, more structured manner rather than the year-to-year lottery of budgets and funding streams being decided for the next financial year only. This cannot help any organisation's future planning.

"As the work and scope of The Carers' Resource increases, it needs more funding. We are very concerned that the current service provided to our practice could be under threat if the organisation does not receive adequate funding.

In the past 12 months the Carers Resource Centre has taken on 925 new carers. There are about 20,000 carers across Harrogate and Craven districts.

More than 40 per cent of its carers are directly referred by doctors, nurses, physios and other health care staff and it is estimated that carers in this area save an estimated £160 million for Government and local government budgets.

Local businessman Brian Murrell, chairman of The Carers' Resource, said: "The politicians rightly see the carers' case as an issue above the local election campaign. By adding to the huge groundswell of support we have had from NHS professionals as well as the carers themselves, they encourage us to think the PCT might yet see the justice of our case.

"We can honestly say our service is unique. By addressing the specific needs of carers - with welfare benefits advice, practical and emotional help, work training, leisure opportunities and support groups - our carers support officers remove a potentially huge burden from the NHS.

"All our early support work for carers was directly commissioned by the health service, and for the past three years we have been negotiating reasonably and courteously for official support but time is fast running out."

Among health professionals supporting the campaign for the carer support team, a local NHS consultant in old age psychiatry, said: "Were it not for The Carers' Resource input with carers, many elderly might otherwise end up in full time care, which is a scarce resource at present. Many carers will be disadvantaged without that input."

The Carers' Resource is also citing the views of Sir Nigel Crisp, chief executive at the Department of Health and NHS, in support. He has emphasised "the need to inform and support carers at a local level through resources such as carers' centres".

Mr Murrell said: "Even at the eleventh hour, we still hope for a satisfactory outcome. That would be in everyone's interests"