A number of local health communities have pledged their support for and confidence in the government’s new 18-week National Health Service waiting time targets.

The prime minister, Tony Blair, has committed to slashing current waiting lists for treatments from the NHS before he steps down later in the year.

And 13 local health areas have expressed confidence in the target and in their ability to be ‘early achievers’, delivering services well within that 18-week maximum.

Visiting King’s College Hospital, which was involved in determining the feasibility of the timescale, health secretary Patricia Hewitt said: “This is about the NHS helping change people’s lives by improving care and cutting unnecessary delays.

“The early achievers announced today show that the NHS believes that this can be achieved and they are keen to lead the transformation of services required to deliver faster treatment and improve patient care.”

Prime Minister Blair said today that achieving this target would mean “real transformation” of the NHS. “But it will only be done if we carry on the process of change … just like everything else in the 21st century, the NHS cannot carry on as if the world was still as it was decades ago,” Mr Blair added.

The target pledge comes as the country’s largest trade union, Unison, launched a scathing attack on the way the private sector profits from NHS contracts.

“The government is allowing multinationals to bleed the NHS dry, which is bad news for patients and taxpayers,” the union’s general secretary Dave Prentis said.

“Wards and whole hospitals are threatened with closure, the jobs of nurses and health workers are disappearing.”

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