REVEALING today that they will not be holding an inquiry into security at the Calderstones Hospital at Whalley, North West health chiefs maintain there are no reasons for concern and no particular problems there that they are aware of.

But just how can they say that when seven patients have absconded in the past 18 months?

How can they be so certain when the latest to do so -- a man referred to the hospital's medium-secure unit by the courts -- is still missing more than a week after giving staff the slip?

How can they remain so confident when a number of staff have come to this newspaper with complaints about the way Calderstones is run and when it is only recently that improvements in staff-patient ratios have occurred and a number of other security matters have been raised?

When such a catalogue of concern is pooh-poohed, one has got to wonder whether these health chiefs dwell in the real world or in cloud-cuckoo-land.

The counter-charge to this, of course, is that the concerns amount to those stirred up by this newspaper as it looks constantly for negative matters to report about Calderstones.

But we would point out that we did not go looking for the concerns. Rather, they were brought to us in the first place by hospital staff.

Yet while we readily accept that most of the people working at Calderstones are dedicated to doing a great job, we have nevertheless a duty to highlight what appears to be going wrong and raise issues regarding security lapses and the way place is run.

And is not Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans -- today demanding a reversal of this refusal of an inquiry -- making a valid and crucial point when he says that health chiefs seems to be treating each case of absconding as a separate case and dismissing a pattern that amounts to a security problem that threatens patients, staff and nearby residents If, in the view of the NHS Executive for the North West, this is not something to worry about, they are fooling themselves. And that IS a worry.