DESPERATE British patients are calling the Belgian Embassy every day in the hope of beating the queue for heart bypass operations, The Northern Echo can reveal.

The situation has become so bad in the North-East that health bosses have been moved to consider asking heart patients to travel nearly 1,000 miles to have surgery on the Continent.

More than 600 patients are waiting for treatment at the South Cleveland Hospital heart unit in Middlesbrough.

A record number of them - 85 - have been waiting for more than a year.

Health Secretary and Darlington MP Alan Milburn has said he is determined to tackle the problem, and has drawn up a national plan which aims at cutting waiting times.

As part of that blueprint, a £17m expansion plan for South Cleveland was approved this week.

But the unit will not be able to treat more patients until 2003.

While the British Cardiac Patients Association is pleased about the Government's expansion plans, it fears the situation could get worse before things get better.

Yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Belgian Embassy in London said they got calls every day from Britons who wanted to beat NHS queues by having operations abroad.

While South Cleveland Hospital will be able to treat an extra thousand patients in three years' time, there is no room to expand at present.

Keen to relieve the pressure, health authorities and primary care groups in the North-East have looked across the Channel for a potential solution.

Professor Jim Hall, chief of cardiothoracic services at South Cleveland Hospital, said: "Our commissioners are concerned that, during the time it takes us to build our new extension, we should provide some extra capacity somewhere," said Prof Hall.

"We are already sending patients to the private Washington Hospital but now they are looking to find other providers," he said.

"A private hospital in Glasgow has been mentioned along with another private hospital in Sheffield.

"At one stage they were talking about Belgium, but I suspect that is not going to happen because of the distance and extra costs involved," the consultant cardiologist said.

Last year, The Northern Echo launched the A Chance To Live campaign to highlight the plight of heart patients.

We visited a heart unit in Breda, Holland, where there is spare capacity and no one waits for a heart bypass for longer than six weeks.

At the time, heart specialist Dr Michael Van Ufford said he was horrified at the length of time British heart patients had to wait for surgery.

When he was training as a doctor, a lot of Dutch patients were sent to the UK for surgery.

He thinks it could be time to turn the tables.

"We could take more than 100 patients - the all-in price is about £10,000," he said.

But Prof Hall said the NHS cost was well under this figure, without counting travel costs.

"I think it is now on the back-burner," he said