If the NHS wasn’t so wasteful it could help Bella to walk
The story of the lady who persuaded NHS surgeons to perform unnecessary operations on her six children (Mail) brought angry tears to my eyes. Is this the same NHS that refuses to fund an operation that is my six-year-old granddaughter’s only chance of walking? Bella Luckett was born with cerebral palsy and is unable to walk unaided. We’ve now been told that the only thing that will help her walk is an operation called a selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR). Great Ormond Street hospital in London has said that Bella is an excellent candidate for this surgery, and has agreed to carry it out in March 2017. But unfortunately the NHS no longer funds this operation, so we’ve got to raise £50,000 to give our granddaughter her only chance. You may remember Bella from April 2014 when she was a flower girl at her auntie’s wedding, ‘walking’ down the aisle with the assistance of an Upsee harness attached to her dad. People from all over the world commented on her lovely smile. Bella is still smiling but, without this operation, she will gradually lose some of the skills she has already battled for and will experience more pain due to the gradual decline that many children with cerebral palsy experience from the age of eight onwards. As well as helping children to walk, the SDR arrests this decline. The Government’s stance is that it is monitoring the children who have already had the operation in order to judge its efficacy. however, all the evidence it needs has already been gathered in America, where the operation has been successfully carried out for 20 years. In the meantime, children such as Bella lose the chance of an operation that could completely transform their lives.
JANE SINCLAIR, Bedford.