Today, the long awaited report into Burnley General Hospital’s Urgent Care Centre is published.

The hospital’s A&E Department was downgraded to an urgent care centre in November 2007 and the issue never went away.

The new Lib Dem MP for Burnley, Gordon “candlelight vigil” Birtwistle has been agitating for the return of A&E to his home town, dismissing the urgent care centre as a first aid post.

Today’s report from Professor Matthew Cooke, the top man in urgent and emergency care at the Department of Health, and his colleague Dr Irving Cobden, stops short from recommending reinstatement – which was outside their terms of reference anyway.

I thought Cooke might re-badge the urgent care centre to reinstate A&E at Burnley but with a publicly available protocol on the conditions which could be treated there. In my mind I had persuaded him!

Instead they call for a review of the terminology so it is standardised and people know what it all means.

We discover that ambulance crews are given a bollocking when they take cases to Burnley!  (No problems with terminology there.)

Cooke diplomatically says they are "vigorously challenged".

Take them to Blackburn! We don’t want them here!

However, the bottom line is that Cooke and Cobden believe there is nothing in the present system that is unsafe. And they are the experts.

But, crucially, they believe more work could be handled at Burnley and many of their recommendations will have this effect.

My old friend Peter Pike, the former Burnley MP, and Ian Woolley, the highly respected former Chair of Blackburn Health Authority, believe the Cooke Cobden report was a worthwhile exercise that takes us forward.

I agree.

Now, we all wait for Gordon Birtwistle’s response.