THE nation's North-South health divide was vividly illustrated by the Government's new NHS league tables last night.

Despite good performances from many hospitals, the tables illustrate that living in the North-East appears to be bad for your health.

While individual hospitals are performing as well if not better than their counterparts in the more affluent South, they are fighting an unequal battle.

Someone from County Durham or Teesside is almost twice as likely to die from circulatory disease as someone from leafy West Sussex.

And a similar bias operates for cancer, with about one-and-a-half times as many deaths in the North-East as in Devon.

Teesside has a particularly poor record, with five-year survival rates for breast and colon cancer putting the authority in the bottom ten places nationally.

Colon cancer sufferers on Teesside have a 24.9 per cent chance of survival, compared with 52.2 per cent of those living in West Surrey.

However, waiting lists for many North-East hospitals are generally shorter than in the South.

The number of people waiting for hospital admission in Southampton is almost double the number of people waiting in County Durham or Teesside.

Problems in recruiting GPs to work in the region are also highlighted by the figures, which show that Sunderland has fewer family doctors per head than anywhere else in England.

The Government statistics cover 56 areas, ranging from cancer survival rates to waiting times and deaths following surgery.

The indicators show there are nearly five times as many people waiting for treatment in the worst performing health authorities compared to the best.

It is the second time the tables have been published based on data from 99 health authorities and about 275 hospital trusts in England.

Gateshead Healthcare fared badly compared with similar hospitals, registering the highest rate of emergency re-admissions within 28 days of being discharged and twice as many deaths within 30 days of non-emergency surgery than the average.

North Durham trust had a higher than average rate of deaths within 30 days of admission with a hip fracture.

Northallerton trust in North Yorkshire was the third worst in its category for deaths within 30 days of being admitted after a heart attack - but scored highly for its high rate of discharging emergency stroke patients within 56 days of being admitted and for getting recovering hip fracture patients back home quickly after their operations.

City Hospitals Sunderland was the third best trust in its category for preventing deaths after admissions for a heart attack.

Welcoming the publication, of the tables, health minister John Denham said: "These indicators highlight the variations in performance which we will need to tackle in the National Plan for the NHS.

"Whether the variations reflect underlying health inequalities, lack of capacity in the local health service, or poorly-organised services, they must be tackled."

The British Medical Association said the tables were still too "crude and unreliable".

Dr Bill Kirkup, director of health for the North and Yorkshire NHS region, said: "Traditionally the health of people living in this area has been among the worst in the country, because of the concentration of mining, heavy industry and deprivation.

"The indicators are a reflection of this rather than the quality of surgical care being provided."