Patients who try to blackmail the NHS

YOU have to hand it to Gillian Jenkins. The 57-year-old from Penarth, near Cardiff, has managed to transform her life after losing nearly 18 st in weight through careful dieting and exercise. All credit to her.

However, the weight loss has left her with unsightly excess skin, and the NHS won’t give her the surgery to remove it.

While I’m very aware of how upsetting this excess skin can be, this was the right decision.

Gillian’s friends have now set up a fundraising page to pay for the £15,000 operation privately. That’s how it should be. Why should the taxpayer foot the bill?

In an ideal world, the NHS would give everyone what they want. But it has limited resources and when we’re rationing cataract operations, I’m afraid that cosmetic procedures such as excess skin removal have to be denied.

The problem is these procedures do still happen on the NHS because patients say they’ve developed depression.

I’ve seen this with a young woman who had a breast enlargement on the NHS because she said her small breasts made her suicidal.

Too often patients effectively blackmail the NHS by playing the mental health card. Woe betide a manager who denies them what they want, because they can then claim they’re being discriminated against.

It’s an impossible situation but it does raise fundamental questions about the role of the NHS: should it give us everything we need or want, or be there just for the essentials?

The problem is that we expect the former, but only want to pay for the latter.