READING about tomorrow's Budget, you could be excused for thinking that the NHS has not had a great deal of extra money already - but it has.

In the past couple of years - after the Government decided it was safe to lift spending targets inherited from the last Conservative administration - millions upon millions of extra money has been poured into the NHS.

Since the setting up of the NHS in 1948, the annual growth rate above the rate of inflation has been something like 3.3 per cent.

For the past two years, health authorities have been allocated well in excess of seven per cent - more than double the historic growth rate.

This is all well and good, but the NHS is increasingly having to run faster to stand still. A combination of an ageing population, increasing drug costs and politically-dictated targets has placed an almost unacceptable burden on the thousands of doctors, nurses and allied staff who keep the health service going.

To add to these woes, the Government's much-applauded National Plan for the NHS sets out a programme of national frameworks for the treatment of different groups of patients which will make increasing demands on the Exchequer.

Within the NHS, the feeling is that to meet these growing demands on the health service, there needs to be an additional increase of two per cent - taking the annual growth figure up to about nine per cent in real terms.

Not only will the funding tap have to be turned a few notches, but the NHS must be confident that the resources will continue to flow at that higher level.

The Wanless Report, commissioned by Chancellor Gordon Brown last year, estimated that if the NHS had had the same level of growth in much of the rest of Western Europe, the health service would have had several hundred billion more pounds invested in its infrastructure and services.

That is the scale of the catching up that now has to happen, and happen quickly.

Apart from the obvious things, such as more beds, more doctors, more nurses and other health professionals, the extra money must also be used to give health care staff a sense that things are finally beginning to improve.

To do that, the extra resources must also be used to tackle basic staffing levels and give NHS workers the opportunity to take time off to learn new and more effective ways of working.

And if the Government is wise, it will slow down the relentless pace of change in the NHS which places additional burdens on hard-pressed staff